| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Penguin English Library features the best novels in the English language. Get lost in the amazing stories, browse the Penguin English Library. |
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
About the Author
Dublin-born Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873) established himself as a journalist and writer of fiction and became one of the best-selling authors of the 1860-80s. His sinister and supernatural tales are the precursors of the modern ghost story.
Victor Sage teaches English at the University of East Anglia. A literary critic and short story writer, he has published critical books on Gothic literature, including Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition (Macmillan).
It was winter - that is, about the second week in November - and great gusts were rattling at the windows, and wailing and thundering among our tall trees and ivied chimneys - a very dark night, and a very cheerful fire blazing, a pleasant mixture of good round coal and spluttering dry wood, in a genuine old fireplace, in a sombre old room. Read the first page
Concordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
'Uncle Silas' is probably the most prominent of his novels. It tells the story of young and naive Maud Ruthyn, whose father's death leaves her under the guardianship of the mysterious uncle of the title. In this respect, the plot is conventional, and the ensuing murder plot to deprive Maud of her inheritance unfolds leisurely and with little of the tense, action-filled plots of contemporary sensation novels.
Instead, le Fanu's brilliance lies not in the complexity of his plot, but in his ability to produce a brooding atmosphere of foreboding and doom that is nothing short of the heightening suspense experienced in 'The Turn of the Screw.' Descriptions are brooding and detailed, stretching conventional settings such as dark woods, locked rooms and lonely churchyards to eerie proportions. Overlaid upon these environments is the continual gloom of secret's untold and the strange influence of religious sectarianism which haunts the family.
Adding colour to these monochrome backdrops are the vividly different, yet equally foreboding, characters that populate the novel. Uncle Silas figures dominantly as the frail and sickly, yet unquestionably evil and devious, opium-addicted menace who drives the machinations of the plot. His tool in his schemes is the grotesque Madame de la Rougierre, who figures as Maud's governess, and who's unsuppressed hatred for the child provides a constant source of fear and anxiety for the orphan while she attempts to uncover the secret that the Frenchwoman suppresses.
Although a classic Gothic novel in appearance, the tale isn't without its light moments, and it is this juxtaposition of moods that makes the overall effect so pronounced. The main characters flit in and out of the spotlight, trading places with a variety of other smaller characters whose intentions and affiliations both Maud and the reader are made to puzzle over in an ever heightening spiral of danger and deceit. This is an excellent novel, one which portrays another side of the dark Victorian imagination, and does so with unsettling authenticity.
Silas is a wonderful character; in my opinion he is the equal of other great Gothic characters such as Dracula. His evil is all the more defined because there is always the chance that he is a reformed character. Maud, the heroine of the story, finds him terrifying yet desperately wants to believe in him as her father did. Here Le Fanu is very clever, because we, the readers, are perfectly aware that as Silas is the title character of a Gothic horror he is highly unlikely to be good, but of course Maud does not have our knowledge. Like a modern horror film when we know that the girl should not go down into the basement where the murderer is lurking, we know that Maud should not agree to her late father's wishes and take Silas as her guardian, but if it was happening to us we would probably have done the same. Part of Le Fanu's magic in this novel is that he has Maud constantly in the midst of terrifying paranoid fantasies about the danger she is in but then she snaps to with a burst of apparent common sense, and looks at the situation as normal people would. Unfortunately for her the situation is not a normal one.
The ending is magnificent and well worth waiting for; the fact that the story built up so slowly with such atmosphere makes it all the more powerful. This is a wonderful book.
I very much enjoyed this book for several reasons. First of all there's the heroine (though heroic she is not) Maud. I'm sure that to most 21st century readers she probably comes across as naive in the extreme but I found her very believable as a character nonetheless. This is according to me largely due to the fact that Maud is also the narrator of her own story, which allows Le Fanu to explore (and reveal to us) the workings of her mind and her inner logic. She may think, feel and react entirely different from us, but to discover why she thinks, feels and reacts as she does makes for fascinating reading. In fact, to me that is one of the key features of all good books: they open a window into other people's minds in such a way that we come to 'understand' them (though at the same time perhaps strongly disapproving of what they do or how they reason). Furthermore, in all her naivety Maud is a very likeable character, the kind you hope the author has a happy ending in store for (although I must confess that at times her unwillingness/inability to 'read the writing on the wall' did exasperate me). It is this detailed psychological study of a young, innocent person caught in the web of a villainous older person that makes 'Uncle Silas' far more than a mere horror story.
The whole story is framed as a memoir written by Maud and in theory this could spoil the fun (because whatever's in store for her at Bartram-Haugh, she obviously lived to tell the tale). However, this did not happen in my case, on the contrary: from the very beginning Maud's story grasped my attention and I found myself rushing from chapter to chapter to find out what happened next. All chapters are in fact written with exactly that in mind which is logical knowing that 'Uncle Silas' was first serialised in 1864 before it appeared in a three-volume first edition.
Lastly, I should mention Le Fanu's superb craftmanship in creating a sinister atmosphere, where something horrible always seems about to happen (and sometimes does). All in all, a superb novel, and deservedly a classic!
The story started off as I would expect of the genre, with evil and menace and a traditional cast of... Read more
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
- Books > Fiction > Classics
- Books > Fiction > Literary Fiction
- Books > Horror > Classic Horror
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
