Alicia Le Fanu (1791 – 29 January 1867) was an Irish poet and writer.

Biography
Alicia Le Fanu was the daughter of Betsy Sheridan and Captain Henry Le Fanu, and a granddaughter of actor Thomas Sheridan and his wife, writer Frances Sheridan. She had a younger sister, Harriet. The family moved from Dublin to Kingsbridge, Devon in the 1790s, and later Bath, from where her mother wrote letters mentioning Le Fanu's emerging literary talents, she considered her daughter's talent for writing to be "much superior" to her own. Her mother encouraged her writing, and ensured that the family library held books that would interest and educate Le Fanu. She began her publishing career in 1809. Le Fanu moved to Leamington Spa around 1822 with her mother, following the deaths of her father and sister.

The exact date of her death is generally stated to be unknown and has been asserted as early as 29 January 1826, but is usually stated to have been in or after 1844. She is known to have been alive in 1844, when she received £150 from the Royal Bounty Fund, secured on her behalf by her cousin, Caroline Norton. However, Fitzer has determined that she died from a subdural effusion on 29 January 1867, while boarding with a family in Chipping Norton.

Le Fanu's poems are moralistic fables, while her historical romances are melodramas, with some satire and elements of comedy. The 1824 Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mrs Frances Sheridan was an account of her grandmother's life but it is accepted that it contains a number of unsubstantiated facts.

She published the Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Frances Sheridan (1824); was known to be living in 1844 when Mrs Norton got her a civil pension, as shown in the Le Fanu Papers at Cambridge.

•The Flowers; or, The Sylphid Queen: A Fairy Tale in Verse (London: J. Harris 1809), 42pp.;

•Rosara's Chain; or, The Choice of Life, a poem (London: M. J. Godwin 1812), 108pp.;

•Strathallan (London: Sherwood, Neely & Jones 1816), 4 vols. [I: 536p, II: 363pp, III: 344pp., IV: 536pp.];

•Leolin Abbey: A Novel (London: Longman &c 1819), 3 vols. [I: 395pp., II: 286pp,., III: 276pp.];

•Don Juan De Las Sierras: A Romance (London: Newman & Co. 1823), 3 vols. [I: iv, 210pp., II: 212pp, III: 298pp.];

•Tales of a Tourist (London: Newman & Co. 1824), 4 vols. [I: 257pp., II: 268pp., III: 257pp., IV: 250pp.];

•Henry the Fourth of France: A Romance (London: Newman & Co. 1826), 4 vols. [I: 231pp., II: 229pp., III: 240pp., IV: 226pp.].

•Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mrs Sheridan, Mother of the late Rt. Hon R. B. Sheridan ... with remarks upon a late life of the Rt. Hon. R. B. Sheridan; and also criticisms and selections from the works of Mrs Sheridan; and biographical anecdotes of her family and contemporaries. By her grand-daughter Alicia Le Fanu (London: G. &W. B. Whittaker 1824), xi, 435pp.;

In 1819 Alicia Hester Le Fanu, a namesake, married William Dobbin, br. of Emma Dobbin, who married Thomas le Fanu, f. of J. S. Le Fanu. Dobbin was wounded in the head during the Peninsular War, subsequently served in the Royal Irish Constabulary and later suffered declining fortunes incl. spells in debtors' gaol.

Introduction to "Strathllan," a novel by Alicia LeFanu"

In 1825 Thomas Moore claimed that the talents of Alicia LeFanu were 'another proof of the sort of gravel-kind of genius allotted to the whole race of Sheridan'.1 Though his expression is oblique his point makes one thing quite clear: Alicia LeFanu's contribution to her family's literary history was as significant as that of her better known relations. Moore's allusion to a system of property succession in which all descendants inherited equally comes in his biographical study of LeFanu's famous uncle, the dramatist and member of Parliament, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and reaffirms the acknowledgment he gives to LeFanu in his preface. Moore's biography appeared a year after Alicia LeFanu published her own family history entities "Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Frances Sheridan, Mother of the Late Right Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan" (1824). Moore was indebted to the assistance afforded him by its 'highly gifted' Arthur2 and LeFanu remains very much at the centre of what is known of this distinguished line. That by 1825 leFanu had also published two lengthy poems and five novels is more extensive proof of her talents. As the first six novels LeFanu completed between 1816 and 1826, "Strathallan" demonstrates, for the first time, the ingenuity and versatility of a writer whose professional career established her as a significant contemporary of Austen and Scott.

Born in Dublin in 1791, Alicia LeFanu was the daughter of Elizabeth 'Betsey" Sheridan, who was Richard Brinsley's sister and the youngest of the four surviving children of Frances and Thomas Sheridan. Given the Sheridan family's tradition of passing on names as well as genius, a brief sketch of its most prominent members clarifies the personal and professional legacy to which Alicia LeFanu contributed her own 'first attempt'. LeFanu's grandfather, Thomas, earned renown as a lexicographer, but his early career as an actor and manager of Dublin's Smock Alley theatre had been encouraged by his father, the poet Dr. Thomas Sheridan, and fostered in the company of his godfather, Jonathan Swift. In the 1750s Thomas Sheridan became involved with Drury Lane and he and his wife moved to London where they became active in a distinguished literary scene which included Frances's mentor, Samuel Richardson. Dedicated to Richardson, Frances Sheridan's extraordinarily successful first novel, "Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph" (1761) was published in Dublin and London and ran to two editions in its first five months.5 It at once invoked and complicated his exemplary models of virtue and sensibility, and Alicia LeFanu's account of its being written in secret as a means of paying off Thomas' debt belies its literary ambition.6

By the time Alicia was ready to follow in her grandmother Frances's footsteps, her mother Elizabeth's first novel "Lucy Osmond" had been published anonymously in 1803, and she had completed two more by 1810.7 Alicia's father, Henry LeFanu, was the second youngest son of the respectable Dublin Huguenot family into which her aunt, also named Alicia, had already married.8 This Aunt 'Lizzy', as she was known in the family, was celebrated in Dublin circles for her private theatricals and would later enjoy some success on the professional stage.9 In drawing on this family background for inspiration, Alicia LeFanu became the most prolific of its authors. 'Strathallsn' is LeFanu's first novel, but not her first publication. Her poem 'The Flowers; or, The Sylphid Queen, a Fairy Tale in Verse' (1809) had impressed her uncle Richard who, upon receiving a copy from Elizabeth read it immediately 'with the greatest attention, and thought it showed a great deal of imagination'. 10 LeFanu returned the compliment with her next poem, 'Rosara's Chain; or the Choice of Life. A Poem' (1812), by signing herself as 'Niece to the Right Honorable Richaed Brinsley Sheridan'.11 It was of course not uncommon to summon such a virtual chaperon in pursuit of what could still be deemed an improper profession for a woman, especially one who was, according to 'Strathallan's" preface, 'unfriended and unpatronized'. But though LeFanu invokes the authority of her grandfather on its title page, 'Strathallan continues to acknowledge her dramatist uncle, as well as other members of the familial canon, on its pages. Indeed, one of 'Strathallan's' most striking features is its negotiation of a variety of narrative and dramatic stlyes, wrought together in a comic-satiric prose narrative which is at once inventive and experimental rather than simply imitative.

In many respects 'Strathallan' is a book about other kinds of writing, and one in which the events are predicated on various pretensions to literariness. The action coincides with the participation of the eponymous Strathallan and his younger half-brother, Spencer Fitzroy, in the Peninsula War between 1808 and 1812, but is mainly confined to the domestic life of Woodlands, the Derbyshire estate of Strathallan's father, Lord Torrendale...

LaFanu was in her mid-twenties when 'Strathallan' was published in the autumn of 1816, and a good ten years younger than Frances Sheridan upon her debut. For the single, inexperienced and ambitious young woman, however, success was as immediate. 'Strathallan' ran to a second edition by the end of the year, at least matching the sensationally short period in which Sheridan's novel had sold out. The pattern continued, a further edition being published in 1817 with a French translation - the translator identified as CH. - H. de J *** - published by H. Nicolle in Paris the following year. An early notice had predicted that the novel was 'likely to prove most popular', and gave as much credit to the author's unique achievements as it did to her consistency with the 'polished style and taste' of her family.

II

If Alicia were ever in danger of running before she could walk, her mother, Elizabeth, offered the steadying hand. Having moved from Dublin to England in the 1790s, Alicia and her younger sister Harriet spend their early childhood in Kingsbridge, Devon. It was from there that, in 1804, Elizabeth wrote a letter to her cousin, William Chamberlaine, extracts from which he included in an article submitted to the "Gentleman's Magazine' shortly after. Entitled "Anecdotes of Miss LeFanu and of Mrs. Jordan' it interpolated Elizabeth's prognostic of Alicia;s 'literary eminence', and was published, in accordance with the request of its author, only when ' she arrived at celebrity as an authoress'.18 Elizabeth's letter gives assurances as to the propriety of her encouraging Alicia in this pursuit:

Her memory was early exercised on subjects
generally tending to some useful object; her
taste for reading has been constantly indulged,
yet no book has ever met her eye, that could
injure her principles, or lessen that delicacy
of mind which, next to religious principles. I
consider as the surest protection to a woman.19

...Alicia's mother had been in her early twenties when she began accompanying her father Thomas on his lecture tours on education and lexicography. For the modern reader, Elizabeth's letters reflecting on her experience of the fashionable milieu of London, and of the spa towns Bath and Tunbridge Wells in the 1780s, are perhaps the most familiar of her writings, having since been published as 'Betsey Sheridan's Journal'. In some respects LeFanu's own situation, and the motivations of Matilda's mother in 'Strathallan' can be traced to Elizabeth's reflections upon the kind of social purgatory experienced by an unmarried but still dependent woman... But Elizabeth had felt that that 'there can be no true pleasure derived even from the most delightful society unless you feel you have a right to your place in it. I cannot make my Father feel the difference the world makes between a man of talents and the women of his family unless these are at least independent.' Then she aspired only to step out of the shared limelight and into 'that middling state of society where people are sufficiently raised to have their minds polish'd though not enough to look down on a person in my situation'.23 It was perhaps with this in mind that Elizabeth embarked upon her own career and encouraged the natural abilities of Alicia which she considered 'much superior to my own... The careers of Elizabeth and Alicia LeFanu were directed by necessity as well as impulse, each demonstrating the pragmatism of women distinguished yet insufficiently financed by a family lime seemingly congenitally incapable of actual prosperity.25

... Alicia's mother had been an avid consumer of fashionable fiction and memoirs in her youth but her published writing, like her epistolary confidences as a mother, show due circumspection. Lucy Osmond suffers no les than the fatal consequences of learning from her 'favorite authors [...] contempt of the world, and toleration of every error that did not amount to positive vice'.27

... Alicia's parents had met at one of Lizzy's theatrical parties and when they married in 1789, Elizabeth was a bride of 31 and Henryformer army captain and half-pay officer, was eleven years her senior....

In her memoir of Frances Sheridan Lefanu [she] would go on to recall how, upon discovering Aunt Lizzy reading one of his "Ramblers', Samuel Johnson had recommended to Sheridan that she be turned "Loose into your library: if she is well inclined, she will choose only nutritious food; if otherwise, all your precautions will avail nothing to prevent her following the natural bent of her inclinations."'35

...Alicia was not the first of her line to look back. R.B. Sheridan had indeed borrowed from his mother's work for his first play, 'The Rivals' (1775).

... May of 1822 - about this time, Alicia moved with her mother to Leamington Spa, and it was there that she completed her first work if non-fiction, the biography of her grandmother.

...The ultimate irony in all this is that LeFanu was most likely an unpaid contributor to the journal ("The Court Magazine"). These were certainly the terms in place when, in 1832, the editorship was taken on by the granddaughter of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Caroline Norton.
###

Alicia (Sheridan) Le Fanu, author of "Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Frances Sheridan" [1]

From find a grave source: Alicia was named after the Honourable Alicia Caulfield, sister to Lord Charlemont. She was a favorite sister of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Married Joseph Le Fanu, brother of Philip Le Fanu, D.D. She wrote numerous works, among which may be named The Flowers, a Fairy Tale (1910), The Sons of Erin, A Comedy (1812).

Alicia Lefanu was born in Dublin to author Frances Chamberlaine Sheridan and actor, theatre-owner, and author Thomas Sheridan. She spent much of her childhood in England and France, but appears to have lived in Dublin for most of her adult life. In 1776, she married Joseph Lefanu, a government official in Ireland and the brother of authors Philip and Peter Lefanu. She had three children, the eldest of whom was Dean of Emly and the father of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, the prolific novelist and frequent contributor to the Dublin University Magazine. The extended family of Lefanus and Sheridans included numerous other authors: Lefanu's grandfather was a translator and friend of Jonathan Swift; her brother, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, remains one of the best-known playwrights of the late eighteenth century; her niece, Alicia Lefanu, with whom she is sometimes confused, published a number of novels and volumes of poetry as well as a biography of Frances Sheridan; her great-niece, Caroline Norton, was a successful poet and controversial essayist on women's rights.[6] The early generations of the family had a particularly strong presence in the theatre: Frances Sheridan's plays and a farce by Thomas Sheridan were regularly performed in the second half of the eighteenth century and R. B. Sheridan's plays were, of course, considerable successes in their day and since.

The following letter to her brother Richard B. from his elder sister:

MY DEAR BROTHER, Dublin, May 9, 1816.

"I am very, very sorry you are ill; but I trust in God your naturally strong constitution will retrieve all, and that I shall soon have the satisfaction of hearing that you are in a fair way of recovery. I well know the nature of your complaint, that it is extremely painful, but if properly treated, and no doubt you have the best advice, not dangerous. I know a lady now past seventy four, who many years since was attacked with a similar complaint, and is now as well as most persons of her time of life. Where poulticing is necessary, I have known oatmeal used with the best effect. Forgive, dear brother, this officious zeal. Your son Thomas told me he felt obliged to me for not prescribing for him. I did not, because in his case I thought it would be ineffectual; in yours I have reason to hope the contrary. I am very glad to hear of the good effect change of climate has made in him;—I took a great liking to him; there was something kind in his manner that won upon my affections. Of your son Charles I hear the most delightful accounts:—that he has an excellent and cultivated understanding, and a heart as good. May he be a blessing to you, and a compensation for much you have endured! That I do not know him, that I have not seen you, (so early and so long the object of my affection,) for so many years, has not been my fault; but I have ever considered it as a drawback upon a situation not otherwise unfortunate; for, to use the words of Goldsmith, I have endeavored to 'draw upon content for the deficiencies of fortune;' and truly I have had some employment in that way, for considerable have been our worldly disappointments. But those are not the worst evils of life, and we have good children, which is its first blessing. I have often told you my son Tom bore a strong resemblance to you, when I loved you preferably to any thing the world contained. This, which was the case with him in childhood and early youth, is still so in mature years. In character of mind, too, he is very like you, though education and situation have made a great difference. At that period of existence, when the temper, morals, and propensities are formed, Tom had a mother who watched over his health, his well-being, and every part of education in which a female could be useful. You had lost a mother who would have cherished you, whose talents you inherited, who would have softened the asperity of our father's temper, and probably have prevented his unaccountable partialities. You have always shown a noble independence of spirit, that the pecuniary difficulties you often had to encounter could not induce you to forego. As a public man, you have been, like the motto of the Lefanu family, 'Sine macula,' and I am persuaded had you not too early been thrown upon the world, and alienated from your family, you would have been equally good as a private character. My son is eminently so. * * *"Do, dear brother, send me one line to tell me you are better, and believe me, most affectionately,"Yours,"ALICIA LEEANU."

Alicia, elder daughter of Thomas Sheridan, and favourite sister of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, married Joseph LeFanu, brother of Philip . She wrote numerous works, among which may be named The Flowers, a Fairy Tale (1810), The Sons of Erin, a Comedy (1812)

Grandmother of Joseph Lefanu Sheridan (1814 - 1873) _______________________________ SONGS, POEMS, AND VERSES BY Helen, Lady Dufferin (COUNTESS OF GIFFORD)

Edited, with a Memoir and some Account of the Sheridan Family, by her Son THE MARQUESS OF DUFFERIN AND AVA SECOND EDITION

LONDON JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET 1894

DEC 16 1956 Printed by R. & R. CLARK, Edinburgh

JOSEPH LE FANU But those of the Sheridans to whom I have thus briefly referred, are not the only scions of the house who have enriched the literature of their country with works of recognised value; for it will be seen on reference to a table appended to this volume that during the last two hundred and fifty years the family has produced twenty-seven authors and more than two hundred works. Of the collateral contributors to its literary fame I will only mention two: Joseph Sheridan Le Farm, grandson of Brinsley Sheridan's sister Alicia, who wrote the House by the Churchyard, Uncle Silas, and some other powerful novels, as well as the delightful ballad of "Shamus O'Brien," and Sheridan Knowles, descended from Thomas Sheridan of Quilca, Swift's friend, the author of the Hunchback, a play that still keeps the stage, as well as of other works and poems of considerable repute. The following short essay on the Life of Man which Joseph Le Fanu submitted, when a little boy, to his scandalised father, will show that the family wit continued to sparkle as brightly in the side channels as in the main current:

"A man's life," writes this young philosopher, "naturally divides itself into three distinct parts the first, when he is planning and contriving all kinds of villainy and rascality. That is the period of youth and innocence. In the second, he is found putting in practice all the villainy and rascality he has contrived. That is the flower of manhood and prime of life. The third and last period is that when he is making his soul and preparing for another world. That is the period of dotage".

Mr. William Le Fanu, Joseph's brother, has also recently published a charming book, entitled Seventy Tears of Irish Life. Nor must we omit from the category of Sheridan authors the three remarkable women who became the wives of the last three Sheridans I have mentioned Miss Chamberlaine, Miss Linley, and Miss Callander.

________________

Introduction to "Strathllan," by Alicia LeFanu", her sister Anne's daughter.

In 1825 Thomas Moore claimed that the talents of Alicia LeFanu were 'another proof of the sort of gravel-kind of genius allotted to the whole race of Sheridan'.1 Though his expression is oblique his point makes one thing quite clear: Alicia LeFanu's contribution to her family's literary history was as significant as that of her better known relations. Moore's allusion to a system of property succession in which all descendants inherited equally comes in his biographical study of LeFanu's famous uncle, the dramatist and member of Parliament, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and reaffirms the acknowledgment he gives to LeFanu in his preface. Moore's biography appeared a year after Alicia LeFanu published her own family history entities "Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Frances Sheridan, Mother of the Late Right Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan" (1824). Moore was indebted to the assistance afforded him by its 'highly gifted' Arthur2 and LeFanu remains very much at the centre of what is known of this distinguished line. That by 1825 leFanu had also published two lengthy poems and five novels is more extensive proof of her talents. As the first six novels LeFanu completed between 1816 and 1826, "Strathallan" demonstrates, for the first time, the ingenuity and versatility of a writer whose professional career established her as a significant contemporary of Austen and Scott.

Born in Dublin in 1791, Alicia LeFanu was the daughter of Elizabeth 'Betsey" Sheridan, who was Richard Brinsley's sister and the youngest of the four surviving children of Frances and Thomas Sheridan. Given the Sheridan family's tradition of passing on names as well as genius, a brief sketch of its most prominent members clarifies the personal and professional legacy to which Alicia LeFanu contributed her own 'first attempt'.3 LeFanu's grandfather, Thomas, earned renown as a lexicographer, but his early career as an actor and manager of Dublin's Smock Alley theatre had been encouraged by his father, the poet Dr. Thomas Sheridan, and fostered in the company of his godfather, Jonathan Swift.4 In the 1750s Thomas Sheridan became involved with Drury Lane and he and his wife moved to London where they became active in a distinguished literary scene which included Frances's mentor, Samuel Richardson. Dedicated to Richardson, Frances Sheridan's extraordinarily successful first novel, "Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph" (1761) was published in Dublin and London and ran to two editions in its first five months.5 It at once invoked and complicated his exemplary models of virtue and sensibility, and Alicia LeFanu's account of its being written in secret as a means of paying off Thomas' debt belies its literary ambition.6

By the time Alicia was ready to follow in her grandmother Frances's footsteps, her mother Elizabeth's first novel "Lucy Osmond" had been published anonymously in 1803, and she had completed two more by 1810.7 Alicia's father, Henry LeFanu, was the second youngest son of the respectable Dublin Huguenot family into which her aunt, also named Alicia, had already married.8 This Aunt 'Lizzy', as she was known in the family, was celebrated in Dublin circles for her private theatricals and would later enjoy some success on the professional stage.9 In drawing on this family background for inspiration, Alicia LeFanu became the most prolific of its authors. 'Strathallsn' is LeFanu's first novel, but not her first publication. Her poem 'The Flowers; or, The Sylphid Queen, a Fairy Tale in Verse' (1809) had impressed her uncle Richard who, upon receiving a copy from Elizabeth read it immediately 'with the greatest attention, and thought it showed a great deal of imagination'. 10 LeFanu returned the compliment with her next poem, 'Rosara's Chain; or the Choice of Life. A Poem' (1812), by signing herself as 'Niece to the Right Honorable Richaed Brinsley Sheridan'.11 It was of course not uncommon to summon such a virtual chaperon in pursuit of what could still be deemed an improper profession for a woman, especially one who was, according to 'Strathallan's" preface, 'unfriended and unpatronized'. But though LeFanu invokes the authority of her grandfather on its title page, 'Strathallan continues to acknowledge her dramatist uncle, as well as other members of the familial canon, on its pages. Indeed, one of 'Strathallan's' most striking features is its negotiation of a variety of narrative and dramatic stlyes, wrought together in a comic-satiric prose narrative which is at once inventive and experimental rather than simply imitative.

In many respects 'Strathallan' is a book about other kinds of writing, and one in which the events are predicated on various pretensions to literariness. The action coincides with the participation of the eponymous Strathallan and his younger half-brother, Spencer Fitzroy, in the Peninsula War between 1808 and 1812, but is mainly confined to the domestic life of Woodlands, the Derbyshire estate of Strathallan's father, Lord Torrendale...

LaFanu was in her mid-twenties when 'Strathallan' was published in the autumn of 1816, and a good ten years younger than Frances Sheridan upon her debut. For the single, inexperienced and ambitious young woman, however, success was as immediate. 'Strathallan' ran to a second edition by the end of the year, at least matching the sensationally short period in which Sheridan's novel had sold out. The pattern continued, a further edition being published in 1817 with a French translation - the translator identified as CH. - H. de J *** - published by H. Nicolle in Paris the following year. An early notice had predicted that the novel was 'likely to prove most popular', and gave as much credit to the author's unique achievements as it did to her consistency with the 'polished style and taste' of her family.16

II

If Alicia were ever in danger of running before she could walk, her mother, Elizabeth, offered the steadying hand. Having moved from Dublin to England in the 1790s, Alicia and her younger sister Harriet spend their early childhood in Kingsbridge, Devon. It was from there that, in 1804, Elizabeth wrote a letter to her cousin, William Chamberlaine, extracts from which he included in an article submitted to the "Gentleman's Magazine' shortly after. Entitled "Anecdotes of Miss LeFanu and of Mrs. Jordan' it interpolated Elizabeth's prognostic of Alicia;s 'literary eminence', and was published, in accordance with the request of its author, only when ' she arrived at celebrity as an authoress'.18 Elizabeth's letter gives assurances as to the propriety of her encouraging Alicia in this pursuit:

Her memory was early exercised on subjects generally tending to some useful object; her taste for reading has been constantly indulged, yet no book has ever met her eye, that could injure her principles, or lessen that delicacy of mind which, next to religious principles. I consider as the surest protection to a woman.19

...Alicia's mother had been in her early twenties when she began accompanying her father Thomas on his lecture tours on education and lexicography. For the modern reader, Elizabeth's letters reflecting on her experience of the fashionable milieu of London, and of the spa towns Bath and Tunbridge Wells in the 1780s, are perhaps the most familiar of her writings, having since been published as 'Betsey Sheridan's Journal'. In some respects LeFanu's own situation, and the motivations of Matilda's mother in 'Strathallan' can be traced to Elizabeth's reflections upon the kind of social purgatory experienced by an unmarried but still dependent woman... But Elizabeth had felt that that 'there can be no true pleasure derived even from the most delightful society unless you feel you have a right to your place in it. I cannot make my Father feel the difference the world makes between a man of talents and the women of his family unless these are at least independent.' Then she aspired only to step out of the shared limelight and into 'that middling state of society where people are sufficiently raised to have their minds polish'd though not enough to look down on a person in my situation'.23 It was perhaps with this in mind that Elizabeth embarked upon her own career and encouraged the natural abilities of Alicia which she considered 'much superior to my own... The careers of Elizabeth and Alicia LeFanu were directed by necessity as well as impulse, each demonstrating the pragmatism of women distinguished yet insufficiently financed by a family lime seemingly congenitally incapable of actual prosperity.25

... Alicia's mother had been an avid consumer of fashionable fiction and memoirs in her youth but her published writing, like her epistolary confidences as a mother, show due circumspection. Lucy Osmond suffers no les than the fatal consequences of learning from her 'favorite authors [...] contempt of the world, and toleration of every error that did not amount to positive vice'.27

... Alicia's parents had met at one of Lizzy's theatrical parties and when they married in 1789, Elizabeth was a bride of 31 and Henryformer army captain and half-pay officer, was eleven years her senior....

In her memoir of Frances Sheridan Lefanu [she] would go on to recall how, upon discovering Aunt Lizzy reading one of his "Ramblers', Samuel Johnson had recommended to Sheridan that she be turned "Loose into your library: if she is well inclined, she will choose only nutritious food; if otherwise, all your precautions will avail nothing to prevent her following the natural bent of her inclinations."'35

...Alicia was not the first of her line to look back. R.B. Sheridan had indeed borrowed from his mother's work for his first play, 'The Rivals' (1775).

... May of 1822 - about this time, Alicia moved with her mother to Leamington Spa, and it was there that she completed her first work if non-fiction, the biography of her grandmother.

...The ultimate irony in all this is that LeFanu was most likely an unpaid contributor to the journal ("The Court Magazine"). These were certainly the terms in place when, in 1832, the editorship was taken on by the granddaughter of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Caroline Norton.64

FROM DICTIONARY OF NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY (Page 398):

LE FANU, PHILIP (1790), divine, son of William Le Fanu, by his wife Henriette Roboteau de Pugebaut, was born in Ireland about 1735. His ancestors were refugee Huguenots who fled from Caen in Normandy on the revocation of the edict of Nantes (TAYLOR, p. 450). He graduated M.A. at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1755, and took the degree of D.D. in 1776. He translated the Abbe Guen6e's 'Lettres de certaines Juives a Monsieur Voltaire,' under the title 'Letters of certain Jews to Voltaire, containing an Apology for their People and for the Old Testament,' against Voltaire's aspersions, both by way of indirect attack upon Christianity, 2 vols. Dublin, 1777; 2nd edit. 1790. He is also said to have written a' History of the Council of Constance,' Dublin, 1787, 8vo.

A brother, Peter Le Fanu (1778), was author of 'an occasional prelude,' entitled ' Smock Alley Secrets,' which was produced at the Dublin Theatre in 1778 (baker, Biog. Dram.)

Le Fanu's sister-in-law, Mrs. Alicia Le Fanu (1753-1817), was eldest daughter of Thomas Sheridan, and favourite sister of the dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan [q. v.] She was born in January 1753, and married in 1776 Philip's brother, Joseph Le Fanu. She was the author of a patriotic comedy entitled' Sons of Erin, or Modern Sentiment,' which was acted' once only' at the Lyceum Theatre, London, on 13 April 1812 (GENEST, viii. 279). She died on 4 Sept. 1817 at Dublin, and was buried in St. Peter's graveyard. Of her three children the eldest, Thomas Philip, was dean of Emly and father of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [q. v.) the novelist.

Another of Philip's brothers, Henry Le Fanu, a captain in the 56th regiment, married Anne Elizabeth, youngest child of Thomas Sheridan, who died at Leamington on 4 Jan. 1837, aged 79 (Gent. Mag. 1837, ii. 585), leaving a daughter Alicia Le Fanu (1812-1826), who, in addition to some longwinded historical romances, and stories in verse, published in 1824 'Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Frances Sheridan, mother of the late Right Hon. R. B. Sheridan, by her Grand-daughter' (see Gent. Mag. 1824, i. 583).

[Webb's Compendium of Irish Biog. p. 288; Smiles's Huguenots, p. 410; Harvey's Genealog. Tables of Families of Sheridan, Le Fanu, and Knowles; Memoirs of Mrs. Sheridan, passim; Gent. Mag. 1817, ii. 285; Allibone; Brit. Mus. Cat.] T. S.

LeFanu, Elizabeth, younger sister of Alicia, married Captain Henry LeFanu, brother of Joseph LeFanu. Elizabeth's daughter, Alicia, was author of The Indian Voyage, Strathallan (1816), Helen Monteagle (1818), and other novels, besides a volume of poetry (1812).

Notes
Elicia was born in 1753 and baptized 5 January 1753 at St Mary's in Dublin. [2]
Lefanu, Alicia, fl. 1812-1826. Memoirs of the life and writings of Mrs. Frances Sheridan, with remarks upon a late life of the right Hon. R. B. Sheridan'. London : G. and W. B. Whittaker, 1824. Digitized by Google from the library of the University of California Libraries and uploaded to the Internet Archive.

Memoirs of the life and writings of Mrs. Frances Sheridan, with remarks upon a late life of the right Hon. R. B. Sheridan This was written by his niece and clears up much incorrect information about this family.