The cover art for the iconic Dover Publications editions of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu often utilizes 19th-century archival illustrations rather than contemporary commissions. The covers were designed by the company’s legendary editor and scholar, E.F. Bleiler. He often selected the specific archival woodcuts and period artwork used for these covers to ensure they captured the "shudder-filled" atmosphere of Le Fanu’s prose.
The specific illustration on the cover of Guy Deverell is a wood engraving, but there is no credit for the artist (often the case with many publishers printing public domain novels). It is appropriately creepy because of the objects (old church, dead tree, crow), but the colorization is excellent. I’m sure the original image was black and white. If Bleiler designed the cover, he chose swaths of blue, great and amber which come together to suggest the “sensational” quality of the story.
Another excellent cover in the Dover Sheridan Le Fanu reprints is the one for Uncle Silas. This one uses bold color swaths, but adds the lone figure of a young woman in a pose of worry or contemplation. This fits the novel perfectly as it is the story of a young girl and her nemesis, Uncle Silas. If you were to read one Le Fanu novel, this should be the one. It’s my favorite of his books
The Dover editions of Le Fanu are mostly out of print and somewhat expensive in good condition. Dover currently (2026) reprints his Ghost Stories and Carmilla (a wonderful lesbian vampire story)
The sensation novel was a major Victorian literary genre, associated with the period 1850 to 1890, that mixed domestic realism with crime, secrets, adultery, bigamy, blackmail, mistaken identity, and murder. It became famous for making respectable middle-class life seem unstable and dangerous, often by placing shocking events inside ordinary homes. A simple way to think of it is: the sensation novel is Victorian fiction’s answer to the question, “What terrible secrets might be hiding inside a perfectly respectable house?”
Sheridan Le Fanu, a Scottish author, is one of the most famous authors in this idiom. Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Ellen Wood were also well-known authors who wrote sensation novels.
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The Wikipedia entry on sensation novels is particularly informative.
Broadview Press (one of my favorites) reprints relatively unknown Sensation Literature
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