Sheridan Le Fanu - References To Sheridan Le Fanu in Fiction

References To Sheridan Le Fanu in Fiction

In Dorothy L. Sayers's novel Gaudy Night, set in 1935, the main character Harriet Vane, a crime fiction writer, covers her investigation on a mystery case at her fictional Oxford college, Shrewsbury, with research on Sheridan Le Fanu. In Thrones, Dominations, the last, unfinished novel by Sayers, completed by Jill Paton Walsh, the Author's Note states that Harriet Vane published a monograph on Sheridan Le Fanu in 1946, drawing on this research. However, Sayers' first reference to Le Fanu appears in an earlier Lord Peter Wimsey novel, The Nine Tailors (1934), where he is quoted directly (from Wylder's Hand, in the opening to the seventh "part" of Chapter II and again in the opening to the second "part" of Chapter III) and a mysterious letter is referred to (first by Wimsey's valet, Mervyn Bunter) as "written by a person of no inconsiderable literary ability, who had studied the works of Sheridan Lefanu and was, if I may be permitted the expression, bats in the belfry, my lord."

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