Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram Haugh

Uncle Silas, A Tale of Bartram Haugh, is an 1864 Victorian Gothic mystery-thriller novel by the Irish writer J. Sheridan Le Fanu. Despite Le Fanu resisting its classification as such, the novel has also been hailed as a work of sensation fiction by contemporary reviewers and modern critics alike. It is an early example of the locked-room mystery subgenre, rather than a novel of the supernatural (despite a few creepily ambiguous touches), but does show a strong interest in the occult and in the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish scientist, philosopher and Christian mystic.

An heiress becomes ward to her disreputable uncle with an unsavory past, tainted by the apparent suicide of a man to whom he owed a large gambling debt, and must help clear his name.