Sir, – Paul Griffin (Letters, October 29th) should look beyond events this Halloween in Dublin before urging a revival of interest in Sheridan Le Fanu. We have just held our third Le Fanu Festival in Abington, Murroe, Co Limerick, where Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu spent his formative years while his father was rector of the local Protestant church.
Our festival has hosted Le Fanu fans, locals, academics, historians, singers, and musicians, to celebrate the valued contributions of the Le Fanu family to Ireland. We have toured the rectory where they lived, and heard about how the wild landscape, with the ruins of medieval Abbeyowney, and the terror of the Tithe War (the Le Fanus were in the firing line as Protestant clergy) influenced the gothic imagination of Sheridan Le Fanu. We have explored the stories he collected from the area in Stories of Lough Guir, one of which, The Child That Went With The Faeries, was recently made into a short film by Limerick Youth Theatre. We have listened with pleasure to soprano Janet Woods singing excerpts from “Shamus O’Brien”, an opera by Charles Villiers Stanford with libretto by Sheridan Le Fanu.
Last Saturday (October 26th), we were delighted to welcome Prof Nicola LeFanu, great grand-niece of Sheridan, as our guest of honour. Nicola gave a wonderful talk on the women writers of the family, going back to Frances Sheridan, mother of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, our Sheridan’s great-uncle and namesake.
We believe that there is room in the wide world of Irish literature for celebrations of both Bram Stoker and Sheridan Le Fanu, and we send our warmest congratulations to the organisers of the Bram Stoker Festival on the discovery and first reading of the long-lost ghost story Gibbet Hill. Last weekend was a particularly thrilling one for Irish Gothic!
If Mr Griffin still wishes to revive the fortunes of a 19th-century Irish Gothic author descended from Huguenots, we are sure that the ghost of Charles Maturin would be glad of a call. – Yours, etc,
MIRIAM LOHAN,
GRÁINNE WALSH,
JULIE LONG,
JOHN ELLIOTT,
The Le Fanu Festival Committee,
Abington,
Murroe,
Co Limerick.