Sheridan Le Fanu 
The Haunted Baronet 

The Haunted Baronet by Sheridan Le Fanu  is a novella published in 1871 in the Chronicles of Golden Friars, a collection of short stories set in the imaginary English village of Golden Friars.




Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu  was an Irish writer of Gothic tales,  mystery novels, and horror fiction. He was a leading ghost story writer of his time, central to the development of the genre in the Victorian era. M. R. James described Le Fanu as ‘absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories’. Three of his best-known works are the locked-room mystery 
Uncle Silas, the lesbian vampire novella 
Carmilla, and the historical novel 
The House by the Churchyard.



Sheridan Le Fanu was born at 45 Lower Dominick Street,  Dublin, into a literary family of Huguenot, Irish and English descent. He had an elder sister, Catherine Frances, and a younger brother, William Richard. His parents were Thomas Philip Le Fanu and Emma Lucretia Dobbin.



Both his grandmother Alicia Sheridan Le Fanu and his great-uncle Richard Brinsley Sheridan were playwrights (his niece Rhoda Broughton would become a successful novelist), and his mother was also a writer, producing a biography of Charles Orpen.