Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu was a man who used his own style of fiery shorthand to describe and explain the Irish society in which he lived. He worked almost constantly throughout his life as the author of fourteen novels, short stories, poetry, and a verse drama. Although the majority of his novels are set specifically in the English countryside, they become clearer when transferred to an Irish setting. During Le Fanu's later years his mind was almost entirely occupied with the supernatural and all the short stories he wrote at this time were of this nature, for example "Carmilla" and "Green Tea". His peculiar lifestyle habits contributed to this obsession and there is no doubt that many of these strange stories came to him in the form of dreams. Brinsley Le Fanu, his son, told SM Ellis of his daily routine: Le Fanu wrote mostly late at night in bed, using notebooks for his manuscript and always had two small candles lit on a bedside table next to him. Around 2 a.m., he would wake up amid the dark shadows of the heavy furniture and hangings of his old-fashioned bedroom and proceed to brew a pot of tea which he drank continuously throughout the day. He wrote for a few hours in that strange time of night when human vitality is at its lowest and the powers of darkness are terrifying. “Carmilla” is the final story in the “In a Glass Darkly” collection. It is an “orthodox” account of the materialization of the disembodied dead in its crudest form, the vampire. Carmilla is the epitome of vampire lore. What's least horrible about Carmilla isn't the strain of lesbian perversity in her passionate declarations for Laura. 'Green Tea' is the story of a ma...... middle of paper ......Browne, Nelson. “Sheridan LeFanu”. Sullivan, Jack. 'Elegant Nightmares' 'AN ASCENDANCE AND ITS VAMPIRES.' DR O'Connor Lysaght. History of Ireland, Vol. 20, no. 3 (May/June 2012). Stoddart, Helen. "The precautions of nervous people are infectious": Sheridan le Fanu's Symptomatic Gothic'. The Modern Language Review, Vol. 86, No. 1 (January 1991) Cahill, Ann, 'Irish Folk Tales and Supernatural Literature: Patrick Kennedy and Sheridan Le Fanu', in: That Other World The Supernatural and the Fantastic in Irish Literature and Its Contexts, Vol. 1, ed. Reflections on Irish Fantasy from Sheridan Le Fanu to John Banville'. Nordic Irish Studies, Vol. 1, (2002).McCormack, WJ, 'Dissolute Characters: Irish literary history through Balzac, Sheridan Le Fanu, Yeats and Bowen.’