Wylder's Hand Book

A Deft Hand That Is Sometimes Shaky

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's novels are always treats. You will invariably get a well-established atmosphere, a bunch of memorable and often ambivalent characters, a touch of the supernatural, one or two intriguing mysteries, some wry humour and a narrative style that operates with gaps which many another of Le Fanu's colleagues would have filled with hints, thus destroying their effect.

In his novel Wylder's Hand, which was published in three volumes in 1864 - before that, it had been published in montly instalments -, Le Fanu takes us into the little town of Gylingden - Le Fanu seems to have had a faible for inserting the letter "y" in place names and names of characters, for there are rarely books without such peculiar spellings -, where the Brandons and the Wylders, two branches of an ancient family, are waging their own family war. The old dowager Lady Chelford now aims to end this feud by bringing about a marriage between Dorcas Brandon and Mark Wylder, but to her dismay, Stanley Lake - from another branch of that notorious family - appears on the scene, and also vies for Dorcas's hand. His chances improve after Mark Wylder's mysterious dysapperance because Dorcas has every reason to feel herself jilted when the marriage date approaches and there is still no Wylder but only a couple of letters of Wylder wrytten from the continent. There is also a sub-plot involving William Wylder, Mark's brother, who is a naïve clergyman and who is getting more and more entangled in the web of the scheming lawyer Josiah Larkin.

The novel's strength lies in the characters - there is the egocentric and ruthless Stanley Lake, and his spirited and courageous syster Rachel - a very self-confident woman by Victorian standards. There is the fawning and hypocritical Larkin, the decent Chelford and his imperious mother, as well as the homely vicar and his loving family. It really takes some time until you might have figured out the true mystery of Mark Wylder's disappearance, and there is also a wonderful case of poetic justice. And there is even an atmospheric touch of Gothic horror.

Unfortunately, however, Wylder's Hand suffers from certain narrative blunders, which might be due to the author's intention to strike the iron while it is yet hot - after all, the preceding The House by the Churchyard proved a major success, and now the author deliberately chose English setting to appeal to a broader readership - and from the fact that it was first published as a series of instalments precluding Le Fanu from revising unwise decisions. The most unwise of these decisions is the use of a first person narrator who cannot always be on the scene, and so we very soon get descriptions of events, thoughts and states of mind the narrator cannot possibly know about. To make it worse, the first person narrator sometimes drops from the plot completely and is repeatedly made to reappear on the scene in a most contrived way. Wylder's Hand would definitely have been much better off without the first-person-narrator, but unlike Dickens, who allowed the clumsy first-person-narrator to withdraw from the story in The Old Curiosity Shop, Le Fanu could not bring himself to undertake such a necessary step.

The second drawback of the novel is its tendency to meander and to give us lots of details about electioneering, inheritance law and the intricacies of selling real estate, all of which would have needed the firm hand of an editor. Le Fanu's much wilder hand, however, generously dealt out all these excursions, which makes the pace of the novel slacken in the middle part.

Nevertheless, Wylder's Hand is a very enjoyable novel, although probably not one of Le Fanu's best.