Twenty-six years before Dracula, Sheridan Le Fanu published a vampire novella about a beautiful, weak, entrancing young woman named Carmilla who insinuates herself into a lonely girl’s household and, over months, into an intimacy the narrator can’t quite name but clearly experiences as more than friendship. Stoker read it closely; Dracula’s Dr. Seward even references a case that echoes Le Fanu’s plotting.
What sets Carmilla apart, even from the novel it influenced, is the explicitness of its central relationship. The predatory intimacy between Carmilla and her victim is charged in a way Victorian fiction rarely allowed itself to be, and generations of critics have read it as one of the earliest and most sustained treatments of queer desire in mainstream Gothic fiction.
It sits in this collection alongside the other works that built the vampire myth before Stoker’s novel absorbed and eclipsed nearly all of them.
Read The Origins of Vampire Fiction →
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