An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street | J. S. Le Fanu | Bitesized Audio 2021

Two medical students take up residence in an old house with a dark history, in one of the most famous "haunted house" stories, probably the best known tale written by the Victorian master of the supernatural Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu.

A new, original recording of a classic public domain text, read and performed by Simon Stanhope for Bitesized Audio.

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Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873) was an Irish author who was arguably the most important single contributor to the development of the literary ghost story in the Victorian era, hugely influential on future generations of authors including E. F. Benson and M. R. James, who described him as "absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories". He was born in Dublin into a literary family; his mother and grandmother were writers, and his great uncle was the celebrated playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan ('The Rivals' etc); his niece Rhoda Broughton also became a popular writer of ghost stories in the later 19th century. He wrote in many genres, but his best known works are his contributions to gothic horror and supernatural novels and novellas, including 'Uncle Silas' (1864) and 'Carmilla' (1872), one of the earliest vampire stories. He published many short ghost and mystery stories in various magazines in Ireland and England from the 1850s through to the early 1870s, although many remained uncollected in book form until 1923 when M. R. James compiled and edited the volume 'Madam Crowl's Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery', which revived interest in his work some 50 years after Le Fanu's death.

'An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street' was first published in the Dublin University Magazine in December 1853. It was subsequently republished in a slightly different form as 'Mr Justice Harbottle', in which form it was included in the 1872 collection 'In a Glass Darkly'. The original version of the text was rediscovered and included in the 1923 collection 'Madam Crowl's Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery', edited by M. R. James.

The title card incorporates a detail from a painting of Sackville Street (now O'Connell Street) in mid-19th century Dublin, by the Irish artist Michael Angelo Hayes (1820–1877).

Recording © Bitesized Audio 2021.