J. Sheridan Le Fanu has fallen out of fashion. 

One wonders:  how can this superb Gothic writer be overlooked? 

Victorian novel fans are rather like the Maenads, celebrating Dickens instead of Bacchus at secret rites. They adore sensation novelists like Wilkie Collins and Mary Braddon but Le Fanu has fallen into a ravine that devours neglected writers.

And yet Le Fanu remains a secret superstar.  In 2022 I lauded The Rose and the Key as my favorite book of all time. Was that rash?  This year it is his intriguing Gothic,  Wylder’s Hand, published in 1864, the same year as his famous novel, Uncle Silas. 

Wylder’s Hand, a chilling Gothic mystery, revolves around the disappearance of Mark Wylder.  For hundreds of years, the Wylders, the Brandons, and the Lakes, have quarreled about who owns the huge estate.  It passes from feuding family to feuding family, and Mark has just become the heir.  He and his beautiful, statuesque, silent cousin, Dorcas Brandon, who owns Brandon House, have decided on a marriage of convenience to keep the entire estate together. 

The marriage never takes place.

Chapters III and IV are called, respectively, “Our Dinner Party at Brandon” and “In Which We Go to the Dining Room and the Party Breaks Up.”  The narrator, an outsider, does not know the family well, but his dispassionate voice as he introduces the characters and situation makes the narrative all the more mysterious.  Fragments are missing; when will we find out what happened?  Just when you’ve got it figured out, everything changes.

Conspicuous at the party are  two attractive siblings,  the vivacious, impoverished Rachel Lake, who lives alone on a tiny income in a tiny house,  and her glib, unscrupulous brother, Stanley, who schemes to marry Dorcas.

Mark disappears, and we don’t know why.   We know that Stanley visits Rachel late at night and persuades her to go on a mysterious journey.  But we don’t know the details.  Has Mark bargained to spend a night with her in exchange for keeping silent about Stanley’s vices and troubles?  Is Mark is in a madhouse? In Mark’s absence, Stanley persuades Dorcas to marry him. 

Rachel is by far the strongest character, doing all she can to make peace and to save Mark’s brother, William, the vicar, from a scheming lawyer.

I have read somewhere – perhaps in a detective story – that the most common causes of murder are money and love.  This is certainly true in this spellbinding novel, a Gothic mystery with elements of the supernatural.