SOURCE: "Misalliance and Anglo-Irish Tradition in Le Fanu's Uncle Silas, in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 47, No. 2, September, 1992, pp. 164-86.

In the essay below, Howes discusses Le Fanu's novel Uncle Silas in the context of nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish politics and history.

Terms like heritage and tradition have often functioned as problems, absences, or crippling legacies in discussions of Anglo-Irish culture.¹ In Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's 1864 Gothic novel, Uncle Silas, our heroine, the beautiful heiress Maud Ruthyn, promises her exacting and aristocratic father, Austin, that she is willing to "make some sacrifice" in order to restore the lost honor of their family name and tradition.² Her father exhorts her to remember that "the character and influence of an ancient family is a peculiar heritage—sacred but destructible; and woe to him who either destroys or suffers it to perish!" (p. 104). Austin Ruthyn's speech points out two important features of nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish literature...