During his lifetime Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu was a moderately successful novelist in terms of both critical acclaim and the sales of his books. After his death his reputation slid into the typical decline, and only two or three of his novels remained in print. For the past decade or so there has been a slight revival of interest in his work, which has included a reprinting of all his writings in 1977.

Many cities have had periods of great cultural flowering: Athens in the fifth century, Florence in the thirteenth, London in the sixteenth, Edinburgh in the eighteenth, Concord in the nineteenth. Dublin in the eighteenth century had borne more than a superficial resemblance to Edinburgh of the same period, but it had undergone some change for the worse since the Act of Union. The dissolution of the Irish parliament in 1800 had robbed it of an indefinable something...