The Wyvern Mystery is a 19th century gothic mystery. The story is about a young orphaned girl named Alice Maybell, her haunted past and the present dark atmosphere that makes a chilling and suspenseful tale. Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873) was an Irish writer of Gothic tales and mystery novels. He was a leading ghost-story writer of the nineteenth century and was central to the development of the genre in the Victorian era. M. R. James described Le Fanu as "absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories."