Carmilla
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
Carmilla
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A carriage overturns outside a lonely schloss in Styria, and the young woman left behind to recover becomes the companion Laura has been wanting all her solitary life. Carmilla is beautiful, languid, awake only in the afternoons, and fiercely attached. Girls in the surrounding villages begin to sicken and die. Published a quarter of a century before Dracula, this is the story that shaped it.
About the book
Published in 1872 in the collection In a Glass Darkly, Carmilla is narrated by Laura, an English girl raised by her widowed father in a remote castle in Styria with almost nobody her own age for company. A carriage accident outside their gates leaves behind a beautiful young guest whose mother must travel on urgently, and Laura recognises her from a dream she had as a child. Carmilla sleeps through the mornings, will say nothing about her family, and is by turns affectionate and frightening. Le Fanu wrote the story that fixed the vampire as an intimate rather than a monster — a guest in the house, a friend of the family, and a woman — twenty-five years before Dracula, which borrowed its doctor, its documentary framing and much of its machinery. The attachment between the two young women is written plainly enough that generations of critics have had to work hard not to see it.
Characters
Laura — Narrator
A lonely nineteen-year-old raised in an isolated Styrian schloss, delighted to be given a companion at last.
Carmilla — The guest
A beautiful, languid young woman left behind after a carriage accident, who will say nothing of where she comes from.
Laura’s father — Guardian
A retired English official who takes the stranger in without asking the questions he later wishes he had.
General Spielsdorf — Family friend
A neighbour whose ward died after a similar guest stayed with them, and who arrives with an account of it.
Baron Vordenburg — Vampire scholar
The descendant of a man who once cleared the district, and the one person who knows what is required.
Madame Perrodon — Governess
Laura’s good-natured governess, charmed by Carmilla like everyone else in the household.
About the author
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873) was an Irish writer of ghost stories and Gothic novels, and the owner and editor of several Dublin newspapers. After his wife died in 1858 he withdrew almost entirely from society — Dublin called him the Invisible Prince — and wrote at night, in bed, by candlelight, on scraps of paper. Carmilla appeared in 1872, twenty-five years before Dracula, and Bram Stoker, a fellow Dubliner, knew it well: the vampire who is a guest, a friend and a woman is Le Fanu's invention. His other books include Uncle Silas and the collection In a Glass Darkly.