Uncle Silas
Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873), 1864
★ 3.74 from 7.6k ratings on Goodreads
A nervous heiress is sent to live with her mysterious uncle in a decaying mansion, where charm and menace wear the same face. A slow-burning gothic unease, told in a nervous first-person voice that makes charm and menace feel equally close.
Feels like dread, unease and grief. About freedom, death and memory.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy Victorian gothic novels with a watchful, anxious heroine and a house that seems to breathe threat. The 1864 prose and the heroine’s nervous, circling narration can feel old-fashioned and slow to some readers.
Why read it
For a tense, atmospheric study of fear and dependence, with a charm that is as unsettling as the threat around it.
Pages from the book
What fear does to the body before the mind can decide.
Why did I remain silent and motionless while such an outrage was being committed? If, instead of being a very nervous girl, preoccupied with an undefinable terror of that wicked woman, I had possessed courage and presence of mind, I dare say I might have given an alarm, and escaped from the room without the slightest risk. But so it was; I could no more stir than the bird who, cowering under its ivy, sees the white owl sailing back and forward under its predatory cruise. What remains bright when you look back over a life?
I am not young now. I have had my sorrows, and with them all that wealth, virtually unlimited, can command; and through the retrospect a few bright and pure lights quiver along my life’s dark stream—dark, but for them; and these are shed, not by the splendour of a splendid fortune, but by two or three of the simplest and kindest remembrances, such as the poorest and homeliest life may count up, and beside which, in the quiet hours of memory, all artificial triumphs pale, and disappear, for they are never quenched by time or distance, being founded on the affections, and so far heavenly. Grief is not a memory; it is a place you can walk back into.
Thus entertained, though a little awfully, I accompanied the dark mysterious little ‘whipper-snapper’ through the woodland glades. We came, to me quite unexpectedly, in the deep sylvan shadows, upon the grey, pillared temple, four-fronted, with a slanting pedestal of lichen-stained steps, the lonely sepulchre in which I had the morning before seen poor mamma laid. At the sight the fountains of my grief reopened, and I cried bitterly, repeating, ‘Oh! mamma, mamma, little mamma!’ and so went on weeping and calling wildly on the deaf and the silent. There was a stone bench some ten steps away from the tomb. Sheridan Le Fanu.Le Fanu was editor of the Dublin University Magazine, where Uncle Silas first ran serially in 1864; he wrote much of his fiction after his wife's early death.
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Questions readers ask
- Is Uncle Silas for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy Victorian gothic novels with a watchful, anxious heroine and a house that seems to breathe threat. The 1864 prose and the heroine’s nervous, circling narration can feel old-fashioned and slow to some readers.
- What is Uncle Silas like?
- A slow-burning gothic unease, told in a nervous first-person voice that makes charm and menace feel equally close. Feels like dread, unease and grief. About freedom, death and memory.
- What should I read after Uncle Silas?
- If you liked Uncle Silas, try The Turn of the Screw (Henry James), Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (M. R. James) and The Raven (Edgar Allan Poe).
A taste of the feed
A midnight tap sounds like a visitor until the mind supplies otherwise.
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore— While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. “’Tis some visiter,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door— Only this and nothing more.”
The Raven · Edgar Allan Poe
Three hundred years old, and still checking for grey hairs.
Am I, then, immortal? This is a question which I have asked myself, by day and night, for now three hundred and three years, and yet cannot answer it. I detected a grey hair amidst my brown locks this very day—that surely signifies decay. Yet it may have remained concealed there for three hundred years—for some persons have become entirely white-headed before twenty years of age.
Short Fiction · Mary Shelley
The moment a familiar path becomes somewhere you have never been.
Clarke tried to conceive the thing again, as he sat by the fire, and again his mind shuddered and shrank back, appalled before the sight of such awful, unspeakable elements enthroned as it were, and triumphant in human flesh. Before him stretched the long dim vista of the green causeway in the forest, as his friend had described it; he saw the swaying leaves and the quivering shadows on the grass, he saw the sunlight and the flowers, and far away, far in the long distance, the two figures moved toward him. One was Rachel, but the other?
The Great God Pan · Arthur Machen
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