Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan: In a Glass Darkly. V1. 12 May 2011
 

Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu (28 August 1814 – 7 February 1873) was an Irish writer of Gothic tales and mystery novels. He was the premier ghost story writer of the nineteenth century and had a seminal influence on the development of this genre in the Victorian era.

Excerpt
These five stories are told by Dr Hesselius, a "metaphysical" doctor, the forerunner of the modern psychiatrist, who is willing to consider ghosts both as real and as hallucinatory obsessions. Le Fanu drew on the Gothic tradition, Irish folklore and on contemporary social and political anxieties.