Brinsley Le Fanu (1854-1929)
It is hard to find any information about Brinsley Le Fanu, Irish illustrator, son of famous Victorian writer Sheridan Le Fanu, who wrote many popular mystery and ghost stories in 19th century.
But I suppose much more is available about this story:
His full name was George Brinsley Sheridan Le Fanu. While George (after his maternal grandfather George Bennet) is used as a primary name in most cases, he adopted Brinsley right at the beginning of his adult life. For his parents and siblings, he stayed Bushe, though. Brinsley's family was a part of the aristocratic Irish community in London, hanging out with Edmund Downey, Percy Fitzgerald, Alfred Percival Graves, and family Wilde (Brinsley and Oscar played together as kids). He became friends with George Moore during studies in Paris and married Marion Kate Morgan in 1880. They had two kids who died as infants.
A large part of Brinsley's work was focused on his father's books. He didn't just illustrate some of his best-known novels and short stories but contributed a large part of the background to the plots and acted as a selector of compilations of stories as well. Brinsley also suggested titles for reprints, took care of copyrights and found some of older unpublished Sheridan Le Fanu's short stories among his father's papers. Brinsley wrote one children's story on his own (published as number 283 in Books from the Bairns and titled The Wonderful adventures of Mr. Fox, Mr. Bear, and Mr. Wolf). Among his correspondence, there were two prefaces as well.
His greatest achievement was undoubtedly illustrating of Books for the Bairns series. He produced thousands od line drawings for more than two hundred (!) books published between 1896 and 1920, where he was a sole illustrator or one of the contributors. He was particularly good at illustrating fantastic creatures and also a very skilled landscape painter. Unfortunately, it's very hard to find his paintings today. They are probably, just like many illustrations, part of private collections or simply lost.
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