Nineteenth-century Irish literature, so often relegated to second-hand bookstalls, appears to be coming in for serious revaluation (the renewal of interest in Mangan is a case in point). Though Sheridan Le Fanu's ghost stories, in particular, have never gone out of print, the man and his immediate milieu had fallen hopelessly out of focus and this fine biography-study surely will do much to redress this neglect. He was, in himself, an interesting figure with a career which touched on many areas, while purely as a writer he is as good as Wilkie Collins - which is saying a good deal. (Incidentally, the house in which he spent the last twenty years of his life, No 70 Merrion Square, is now the offices of the Arts Council).