<b>Uncle Silas by Sheridan Le Fanu</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;is an 1864&nbsp;Victorian&nbsp;Gothic&nbsp;mystery-thriller&nbsp;novel by the&nbsp;Irish&nbsp;writer&nbsp;J. Sheridan Le Fanu. Despite Le Fanu resisting its classification as such, the novel has also been hailed as a work of&nbsp;sensation fiction&nbsp;by contemporary reviewers and modern critics alike.<br /><br />It is an early example of the&nbsp;locked-room mystery&nbsp;subgenre, rather than a novel of the&nbsp;supernatural&nbsp;(despite a few creepily ambiguous touches), but does show a strong interest in the&nbsp;occult&nbsp;and in the ideas of&nbsp;Emanuel Swedenborg, a&nbsp;Swedish&nbsp;scientist, philosopher and&nbsp;Christian mystic.<br /><br />Like many of Le Fanu&#39;s novels,&nbsp;<i>Uncle Silas</i>&nbsp;grew out of an earlier short story, in this case &quot;A Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess&quot; (1839), which he also published as &quot;The Murdered Cousin&quot; in the collection&nbsp;<i>Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery</i>&nbsp;(1851).<br /><br />While this earlier story was set in Ireland, the novel&#39;s action takes place in&nbsp;Derbyshire; the author&nbsp;Elizabeth Bowen&nbsp;was the first to identify a distinctly Irish subtext to the novel, however, in spite of its English setting. It was first serialized in the&nbsp;<i>Dublin University Magazine</i>&nbsp;in 1864, under the title&nbsp;<i>Maud Ruthyn and Uncle Silas</i>, and appeared in December of the same year as a three-volume novel from the London publisher&nbsp;Richard Bentley. Several changes were made from the serialization to the volume edition, such as resolving the inconsistencies of names.