Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Lafcadio Hearn
    Lafcadio Hearn
    Lafcadio Hearn
    Ebook65 pages59 minutes

    Lafcadio Hearn

    By Edward Thomas

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    This antiquarian book contains a detailed and insightful biography of Lafcadio Hearn. Born on the Greek island of Lefkada, Patrick Lafcadio Hearn ( 1850 - 1904) was an internationally renowned writer. He is best remembered for his books about Japan, particularly those that concern Japanese legends and ghost stories. Edward Thomas’s biography offers a unique insight into the life and mind of this incredible writer, and constitutes a must-read for those with an interest in Hearn’s life and work. Philip Edward Thomas (1878 - 1917) was an Anglo-Welsh author best remembered for his war poetry. This vintage book is being republished in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition - complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRead Books Ltd.
    Release dateApr 15, 2014
    ISBN9781473393707
    Lafcadio Hearn
    Author

    Edward Thomas

    Edward Thomas was born near Uxbridge in 1943 and grew up mainly in Hackney, east London in the 1950s. His teaching career took him to cental Africa and the Middle East. Early retirement from the profession enabled him to concentrate on writing. Along with authorship of half a dozen books, he has contributed regular columns to several journals.

    Read more from Edward Thomas

    Related to Lafcadio Hearn

    Related ebooks

    Literary Biographies For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      Bloomsberries At War PAUL BAILEY Writing In The Dark: Bloomsbury, The Blitz, And Horizon Magazine

      Jul 28, 2021

      Bloomsbury £20 The subtitle of Will Loxley’s first book does not sound especially adventurous or challenging. Haven’t we, both readers and writers, been here before? It’s not entirely fanciful to imagine a bookshop that sells nothing but biographies,

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Shropshire Lad

      Nov 9, 2022

      A Shropshire Lad
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The King Of Westminster

      May 24, 2023

      The King Of Westminster
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      When the Beasts Spoke: Thoreau and the Sound of America

      Aug 21, 2017

      One of the pleasures of Walls’s Thoreau is seeing how Thoreau’s stubborn refusal to lead an ordinary life turned a bright, but otherwise rather ordinary young man into a great and original artist. The post When the Beasts Spoke: Thoreau and the Soun

      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Visible Man

      Dec 2, 2019

      Visible Man
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Adlestrop

      Jun 8, 2022

      Adlestrop
      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Sunny Depiction Of Dark Times

      Sep 28, 2023

      A Sunny Depiction Of Dark Times
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      What The Thunder Said

      Sep 14, 2022

      ON Margate Sands./I can connect/ Nothing with nothing.’ Thomas Stearns (T. S.) Eliot crafted these short lines that form a part of his fractured epic The Waste Land in October 1921, as he sat in the inauspicious Nayland Rock Shelter (granted Grade II

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Lord Of The Books

      Mar 8, 2023

      The Lord Of The Books
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Ten Ways to Lose Your Literature

      Jan 25, 2021

      Just as all literature is haunted by the potential of oblivion, so all lost books are animated by the redemptive hope of their rediscovery. The post Ten Ways to Lose Your Literature appeared first on The Millions.

      28 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Poet for the Age of Brexit

      Sep 12, 2017

      A Poet for the Age of Brexit
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      On The Hobbit Trail

      Jun 28, 2023

      On The Hobbit Trail
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Gustav Holst Beyond The Planets

      Aug 6, 2024

      Gustav Holst Beyond The Planets
      12 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Late Bloomer

      Sep 1, 2023

      “An eccentric woman deserves an eccentric biography.” So writes Willard Spiegelman in this first biography of the poet Amy Clampitt. If there was anything eccentric about the genteel bohemian Amy Clampitt, it was that she was extremely private about

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Art of Translation No. 6

      Sep 15, 2019

      The Art of Translation No. 6
      30 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Beauty Born Of Ashes

      Dec 1, 2022

      “The Waste Land,” not “The Wasteland” or “Waste Land,” and “not Waste Lands,” T. S. Eliot would correct people regarding the title of his epoch-defining poem. Originally he’d had in mind another title altogether, “He Do the Police in Different Voices

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Pioneering Women

      May 18, 2023

      Professional housekeeper, cook, confectioner, teacher, author; Elizabeth Raffald could be described by many job titles, but the most fitting is probably entrepreneur. Having spent some years working around Yorkshire, Raffald made her name in Manchest

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Secret History of Creative Nonfiction

      Oct 15, 2021

      A common misconception about literary history is that women weren’t writing professionally or significantly before Jane Austen. To talk about women’s historical oppression, Virginia Woolf famously conjured up an imaginary sister for William Shakespea

      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Waste Land turns 100

      Oct 19, 2022

      The Waste Land turns 100
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Old Un's Notes

      Mar 8, 2023

      Happy 75th birthday, Shakin' Stevens! He was born Michael Barratt in Cardiff on 4th March 1948. It's over 40 years since his first number one, This Ole House, in 1981, followed up with Green Door and Merry Christmas Everyone. The Welsh Elvis was born

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Chapter & verse

      Feb 10, 2023

      Chapter & verse
      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Chapter & verse

      Feb 10, 2023

      Chapter & verse
      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Also in December 1784…

      Oct 29, 2024

      Also in December 1784…
      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Rewriting Her World

      Feb 18, 2021

      Rewriting Her World
      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Brooke And The Georgians

      Nov 10, 2021

      Although Rupert Brooke is classed as a War Poet, he died in 1915 and his experience of action was limited to a single day during the evacuation of Antwerp. Trench poets, such as Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg, are now more highly

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Did You Know?

      Sep 1, 2024

      “Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie” (1847), “The Song of Hiawatha” (1850), and “Paul Revere’s Ride” (1863) are among the most famous 19th-century American poems. And the man who composed them, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882), was among the most fam

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Time Of Miracles

      Oct 16, 2023

      A Time Of Miracles
      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Lafcadio Hearn

    4/5

    1 rating1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      An unambiguous and compact viewing of the chameleonic world of Hearn with valuable tidbits deciphering his works and imaginings.

    Book preview

    Lafcadio Hearn - Edward Thomas

    text.

    I

    IN one of his last essays Lafcadio Hearn said that he would like to be buried in the old Buddhist graveyard behind his garden. He liked the place for its beauty and antiquity, and for its great bell. This bell had a quaintness of tone which wakens feelings, so strangely far away from all the nineteenth century part of me, that the faint blind stirrings of them, make one afraid—deliciously afraid:¹ it caused a striving and a fluttering in the abyssal part of my ghost—a sensation as of memories struggling to reach the light beyond the obscuration of a million million deaths and births. It is a thought easily to be paralleled in any of his books. More than any other man he appears to have been unable to forget the dark backward and abyss of his own immemorial past. Is not every action indeed the work of the Dead who dwell within us?² is a sentence which shows what governed his thinking. He himself knew less of his immediate ancestors than most men, but though he would not have expected any great illumination from a far fuller knowledge he was fond of dwelling upon his childhood and origin. How much he knew of them is uncertain. What he has said and what others have unearthed amounts to little—a suggestive and surprising little, though not enough to satisfy the man who was so impressed by the continual resurrection of the past, that he found the worship of ancestors an extremely righteous thing.³ The Hearns are said to have been a Dorsetshire family with a tradition of gipsy blood,⁴ but settled since the end of the seventeenth century in Ireland. The head of the family was then Dean of Cashel. He had eight sons who were soldiers, and of these one was Hearn’s grandfather. His father was Surgeon-Major Charles Bush Hearn, who fell in love with a Greek girl, Rosa Cerigote, while he was in garrison, carried her off and married her. Lafcadio, named from the island of his birth, Lefcada, was the second, but first surviving, child, born on June 27, 1850: his infant speech was Romaic and Italian. Surgeon-Major Hearn took his family to Ireland six years later, and soon afterwards his wife ran away from him or Ireland, never to return. He married again and Lafcadio, being adopted by a great-aunt, never saw father or mother after the age of seven, He remembered that his mother was small, black-haired and black-eyed, and that only once did he feel glad with his father. He favoured his mother, and sometimes thought there was nothing in him, physical or mental, of his father; but Miss Bisland says that the children of his father’s second wife were much like Lafcadio, with dark skins, delicate aquiline profiles, eyes deeply set in arched orbits, and short, supple, well-knit figures.⁵ He himself said that he got his impatience, sensitiveness and affection from his mother, and what pride and persistence he had from his

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1