S02E35 Green Tea by J Sheridan Le Fanu

Joseph Sheridan Le FanuLe Fanu was an Irish writer born in Dublin in 1814 and who died in Dublin in 1873. In his time he was the leading writer of ghost stories and macabre tales. On the podcast, we have read out his masterwork, Carmilla, but Green Tea is an equally well-known story.He was judged by the master ghost story writer of a later generation, M R James as being absolutely first rank. His family were of French protestant (who fled France because of persecution) and English descent. His family were writers, and his grandmother Alice Sheridan Le Fanu and his great-uncle Richard Brinsley Sheridan were famous playwrights. His mother was a writer of biographies.Le Fanu’s father was a protestant clergyman in the Church of Ireland. He was a rector of a protestant church in Ireland and the family were disturbed by the 1830s Tithe War where the majority Catholic population objected to paying tithes to the Protestant minority church. Le Fanu studied law at Trinity but as early as 1839 (when he was twenty-four) he wrote ghost stories for the Dublin newspapers. In 1847 Le Fanu was active in the campaign against the cruel indifference of the British government which did little to relieve the suffering during the Irish famine. Le Fanu’s wife had significant mental health problems and his married life was less than happy. He wrote ghost stories set in Ireland, but due to the influence of his publisher, began to write stories with an English setting because they felt they would sell better. He died of a heart attack in Dublin aged only 58.Green TeaLe Fanu produced a collection of supernatural stories called In A Glass Darkly which was published in 1872. This was ostensibly the collected papers of the occult German medical-philosopher Dr Hesselius. Think of Sherlock Holmes cases ostensibly recorded by Dr Watson. There is little doubt that no publisher would look at Green Tea now. It is full of ‘telling’ rather than showing. Most of the action happens at third hard. There are frames to the story: it is edited by the editor who got the papers at the death of a professor and much concerns Hesselius’s reports of things he has heard.There are philosophical ramblings about Swedenborg’s metaphysics which are of very little interest to the modern reader. However, we know these things were of intense interest to Le Fanu and possibly to his contemporaries. It does introduce Swedenborg’s idea that a man can be conjoined with an evil spirit, however. Sometimes these evil spirits, or even two evil spirits, take animal form. Hint. hint. Le Fanu does dialogue well and the dialogue was smooth to narrate and quite naturalistic. It is quite unclear whether the story reports an actual haunting by a devil monkey or a psychosis. Hesselius diagnoses the end as a hereditary suicidal mania. I’m not sure we believe such things are heritable, though suicide can run in families, though more likely through a nurture rather than nature cause. But who knows?The story that asks: was it madness or was it a monster? Has a strong pedigree. On The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast we have read The Horla by Guy de Maupassant and The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins-Gilman both of which can be interpreted either way.I was recently reading the critic Mark Fisher’s book https://amzn.to/3o546Yl (The Weird and The Eerie) in which he draws a distinction between weird and eerie elements (and also uncanny components) of a story.The ‘weird’ Fisher says is about the juxtaposition of the normal with things that should not be there. The devil monkey is therefore distinctly weird. He talks about how this juxtaposition, as beloved by the surrealisSupport the show

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