Uncle Silas by Sheridan Le Fanu (1864)

I'd never read Le Fanu but had often heard him mentioned as a contributor to the mystery/suspense/sensation novel, and Harriet Vane publishes a monograph on him, which made me curious.

The narrator is Maud Ruthyn, only 17 when the novel begins, and she's grown up isolated in a spooky dark house with her distant, uncommunicative father. He's obsessed with the blight on family honor, many years ago, when his brother Silas was accused of a terrible crime--never proved, but scandalous. Although Maud is heiress to a great fortune, and Silas has an early reputation as a spendthrift rake, the father believes in his Christian reformation and wants Maud to live with him after the father's death--even though Silas is heir after Maud. This, you see, will convince the world of how truly trustworthy Silas is.

As you might imagine, this doesn't go well. Innocent Maud, taught to be silent and compliant, wants to believe the best of her uncle, ignoring all kinds of warning signs--for example, he's charged with educating her, and given a substantial sum to do it, but blandly says that wandering around outside in the fresh air will be better for her. Little by little, he removes her freedoms, and tries to engineer a marriage between his no-good son Dudley and Maud.

The novel has plenty of spooky touches like a frightening bully of a governess, an enormous decaying old house which has had a suicide (or is murder?), religious weirdness, laudanum, rough and scary servants, and so on. Little by little Uncle Silas separates Maud from any friend, including his own daughter Milly.

For me though the feeling of suspense was watered down because the book is, I think, too long. It needs more compression to sustain the right pitch of tension; too often, events extend rather than develop the plot.

Also, I was bothered by a lapse in the storytelling. Early on, one of his Maud's few reliable older friends, whom she trusts--a Dr. Bryerly, a friend of her father's--is alarmed by her circumstances, and tells her very seriously to secretly scratch his London address with a pin on the inside of her clothes chest, leaving out his name, and to burn the paper on which the address is written. He tells her to fly to him if she's ever in serious danger. She follows his instructions to scratch in the address.

Throughout the novel, I kept expecting the tock to follow this tick, wondering when on earth she was going to remember this escape route--especially when Uncle Silas's machinations take her to London. But no, it's as if this never happened. Chekhov's gun on the mantelpiece never goes off. I found this loose end very unsatisfying.

Still, I enjoyed reading this; Le Fanu is a lively writer and some of his scenes are quite funny, especially a fight between Dudley and one of Maud's would-be suitors, with an onlooker encouraging Dudley to knock him in the "dinner-service" again.