Wylder's Hand
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers who love Victorian English fiction and a Gothic atmosphere
- Learners who want to practise reading long English fiction through public-domain ebooks
- Literature enthusiasts studying Le Fanu's work and the suspense tradition
Not a good fit for
- Readers who want a Chinese translation and will not read the English original
- Suspense readers who prefer fast pacing and a dense succession of twists
- Readers impatient with nineteenth-century slow narrative and long sentences
Reading tips
- Read a few pages first to get used to nineteenth-century English sentences, then proceed chapter by chapter rather than trying to do too much at once.
- Jot down character relationships and inheritance clues as you read; this helps you keep up with the groundwork of the plot.
- A little knowledge of Victorian serial fiction will help you appreciate the foreshadowing and the building of atmosphere.
- If the English is hard going, a Chinese summary can help, but make the original text your main reading.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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About the author
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873) was a significant nineteenth-century writer of Gothic and supernatural fiction, with thirty works held in this collection. Public information about his life is limited, so his biography cannot be detailed here; his surviving works, however, show that his main focus was supernatural horror and psychological suspense. The representative work Carmilla broke new ground with its female vampire theme and influenced later writing in the genre; the stories in In a Glass Darkly present uncanny cases through a doctor's narration with ingenious structure; pieces such as Green Tea and Mr. Justice Harbottle weave everyday settings together with dark terror in a restrained yet gripping atmosphere. The novel Uncle Silas combines family secrets with Gothic suspense. His prose is notable for careful atmospheric build-up and for using rational narration to set off the inexplicable, and it has had a lasting influence on later horror literature.
