Uncle Silas

Uncle Silas, subtitled A Tale of Bartram-Haugh, is a novel by the Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu, published in 1864.

Maud Ruthyn is seventeen when her father dies and leaves her in the guardianship of his brother Silas, a man the family has spent years avoiding and whose reputation has never been properly explained to her. Bartram-Haugh, the house she goes to, is shabby and half shut up, its servants are an unsettling collection of people, and her cousin Dudley is a lout who wants her money as much as his father does. Maud's inheritance is the reason she is there, and the longer she stays the clearer it becomes that her guardian's interest in her has very little to do with family feeling. The novel is narrated by Maud herself, so the reader learns what is happening at the same pace she does.

Le Fanu wrote the book out of an earlier short story of his about an Irish countess, and it stands among the Victorian novels that made the mystery of a locked house into a whole plot rather than a single scene.