What a bad story and what a nice episode about it.
Although the story is not well written with respect to plot, conflict, tense, meaning, etc. it truly is a Le Fanu story: his writing style, his putting down words, is very recognizable.
I picked Le Fanu's collection of tales 'In a Glass Darkly' two years ago as a book to read by my own book club (we only read world classics). I already heard of 'Carmilla', but when I read the whole collection, many tales immediately became one of my favorites ever (in particular 'Green Tea' and 'The Room in the Dragon Volant' - the former a really good Victorian weird tale, the latter an interesting Victorian mystery, both full of plot and good use of storytelling techniques).
I mention this, because there HAS to be a reason why Le Fanu wrote an Authentic Narrative as it is. I agree it probably has to do with being it some sort of writing experiment (with a really not satisfying outcome).
In the collection 'In a Glass Darkly', Le Fanu uses a frame story to fuse the stories together. The way in which he did this also really didn't work. The stories, he tells the reader, are cases of a psychiatrist (like the events in An Authentic Narrative is a bare list of unexplained happenings); they should clarify how he resolved/explained the strange things happened to his patients - which he absolutely does not. Maybe this also was a satire on aristocracy or maybe psychiatry, who knows?
What IS interesting in this frame story is that Le Fanu uses the psychiatrist to tell us about the theories of Emanuel Swedenborg, the famous 18th century mystic, who posited a so called Swedenborgian Space, the realm between the living (body) and the dead (soul). It greatly influenced the spiritist movement and ghost stories in Le Fanu's time, and I believe Le Fanu himself was an advocate of it. Although An Authentic Narrative is almost too much rationalist, Le Fanu leaves all this explanatory Swedenborgian stuff out of it. It cannot be otherwise: Le Fanu must have left all this sort of things out of the tale on purpose.
But I can’t explain why – it's a real mystery. Weird. ;-)
Maybe I was a bit too harsh in my opening line. Like I said: his writing style (apart from the content) is recognizable as his and I like that. Also, I don't think Le Fanu just wrote a bad story - again: it looks like he knew what he was doing. So, as a writing experiment, I surely can enjoy the story. The 'bad' thing had to do with me expecting a weird, atmospheric story and getting a bald list of happenings instead.
I also think that taking the narrative as a starting point for something else is a good idea, like it was proposed by McDorman (or was it Budda?) by - first of all - introducing superstition by one of the servants and turning the vague I-person into a curious protagonist.
I'm going to leap to the defence of this story. I actually enjoyed it for what it was. I'm not saying it's anything particularly special, but it does what it says on the tin (well, apart from the "authentic" part of course). It doesn't purport to be anything more than a narrative of the goings-on in a haunted house. Does anyone in the story seem bothered by the haunting? No. Does it have a satisfying ending? Not really. Does it do anything to explain what was actually going on? Again, no. As a narrative of events, though, I thought it was fine.
Maybe it's because I don't really read ghost stories, and I've only read one other Le Fanu story (Carmilla), so I didn't have any expectations. Maybe it's because I read this late at night when I was already half-asleep. I don't know, but it kind of worked for me despite all its flaws from a modern perspective.
That said, I could certainly see someone taking this narrative as a starting point for telling a longer and more satisfying story, either in written form or as a film.
Haha, I love your opening line here. Really, I was just disappointed with this story -- I've read a fair share of Le Fanu and have really enjoyed his major works, so I was eager to read one that was new to me. But we'll get him back on the ballot next year, and I'm looking forward to revisiting him.