Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873)

I had anticipated a slog, but was pleasantly surprised! For its faults, I found this a pretty solid Victorian crime thriller. Though I read Le Fanu’s novels hoping to see some of the horror elements of his quite scary short fiction, I’m slowly accepting that human horrors are what he’s concerned with most of the time outside of short stories.
As others have mentioned, the narration style is bizarre as Le Fanu chose to make his narrator a character, but declined to develop that show more character or include him in most of the action, and switched between first person and omniscient narration in the same chapter sometimes. If Le Fanu had edited out 75% of the sentences containing the word “futurity” as well as the incessant duplicate physical descriptions of the main characters every time they reappear (Stanley’s yellow eyes, Larkin’s dove-like eyes and oblong head), he would have had more room to unfold major events instead of reporting that they had occurred and that he did not know how. Were there not editors back in the day?
The primary female character(s) here are, amazingly, developed with a depth and force of character very unusual for Le Fanu or Dickens, which allowed me to invest in the story to a degree I wouldn’t have otherwise. I wished more of the action had included the heroine rather than the movements of the antagonists. show less

A quarter of a century before Bram Stoker unleashed Count Dracula upon an unsuspecting London, Sheridan Le Fanu wrote of a strange, beautiful, irresistible young woman who once visited her malign charms on a widower and his daughter in an isolated Austrian schloss.

The influence on Stoker is undeniable: the epistolary frame of the narrative, the roots of vampirism in ancient Eastern European nobility, the snake-like charm of the vampire, the utter unpreparedness of rational and Christian show more Europe to comprehend the nature of the primal evil that stalks its heart. Le Fanu even has a remorseless vampire hunter on Carmilla’s trail in the form of a grief-stricken general.

This is Dracula before Dracula, and it has its own peculiarly seductive and haunting quality that makes it a worthy read for anyone who enjoys the genre. show less

A young woman named Laura lives alone with her father in a remote Austrian castle, lonely because her only friend of her age and class recently died under mysterious circumstances. She’s delighted when a carriage overturns near the castle and a young woman named Carmilla must stay with them for a few months while she recovers. Carmilla won’t share any information about her past, does not participate in family prayers, and sleeps most of the day. Laura and Carmilla grow very close, show more physically and emotionally, and Laura realizes Carmilla looks exactly like her ancient ancestor Countess Mircalla. Young women in the nearby village are dying, and Laura falls ill, so her father takes her out of town for a few days. There they learn the true fate of Laura’s dead friend, at the hands (or teeth) of a new acquaintance named Millarca.

A fun, short read. So many of the modern-day tropes about vampires are explicit here, 25 years before Dracula was written. A female vampire is not something that was seen often for the next century, and her vampirism is also sexual, but in a very different way from that of traditional male vampires - she’s very emotional, often telling Laura how much they need each other and how they’ll die without each other. The vampirism itself is also much more focused on Carmilla hugging Laura’s neck than the penetration itself. Historically interesting, but also just entertaining and an easy read! If you haven’t read it before, you really should. The audiobook, read by Megan Follows, was excellent. show less

Le Fanu's 'Carmilla' (1872) is a short vampire tale that is interesting for two reasons other than that it works as story-telling. It is a bridge between the vampire lore of Eastern Europe as it had started to appear in English literature and 'Dracula'. It also has an unusual erotic aspect for the time.

It easily breaks into two halves. The first is the account of a vampire incursion in a Gothic setting where the reader can work out what is happening fairly quickly but not the human show more protagonists. The second unfolds the horror as explanation, leading to the necessary decapitation of the monster.

Le Fanu manages to make the story both English and foreign by having the family under threat as minor aristocratic tea-drinkers of ultimately English extraction who have settled in mysterious Styria after the father's service in the Austrian interest.

European aristocratic expectations and norms, including a protective attitude towards young daughters and 'wards', drive the story along but it is also clear that the predator species is of even higher local aristocratic lineage.

The imperial service class is threatened by the ghosts of a more ancient independent aristocracy without moral bounds and interested only in their own pleasures. The seeds of Anne Rice's vampires are here although Le Fanu's Anglo-Irish descent is probably of more interest.

The story undoubtedly influenced another Anglo-Irish writer, Bram Stoker, whose 'Dracula', a quarter of a century later, would further develop some of the motifs of this tale, weakening and transferring the eroticism from a female to male predator from an even darker barbaric aristocratic background.

There is much written (exaggerated in my view) about vampirism as metaphor for the relationship between England and Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century but Anglo-Irish ambivalence about the English ruling class to which it played a supporting role may have been a factor here.

What is more interesting is that the story is highly emotional. The old general who uncovers the vampiric evil appears to lose his reason (he does not) in hunting it down. There is tenderness, warmth and love within the households on which the vampire prey.

But the most intense emotion is the most ambiguous - the undoubted erotic charge between predator vampire (a woman presenting as a girl) and its victims, very young and vulnerable women. The predator offers something that disturbs and attracts at the same time. It is obviously sexual.

Le Fanu is exploring the disruptive power of desire. The vampires usually just take what they want as clinical murderous blood-sucking but (it seems) periodically (this was adopted by Stoker in 'Dracula'), they become obsessively interested in one beautiful victim who they 'groom'.

It is this process of 'grooming' that becomes fascinating because the account, ostensibly about a vampire, is, in fact, about seduction in Victorian society and, equally, about the vulnerability of 'innocence' in a world that is so good that it cannot recognise evil when it presents itself.

As readers we do not have to be enormously bright to get what is happening but, equally, there is no reason for the protagonists to identify evil when evil is not part of their cosy and kindly world of mutual care and regard. When tragedy strikes, it is beyond understanding. It shatters survivors.

The reader sits horrified as evil seduces the innocent in a way that makes the grand guignol of the final decapitation relatively trivial as horror. The innocent are only a 'kiss' or touch away from death - or would it be a 'fate worse than death' as Victorian culture understood this concept?

Loss of sexual innocence in the middle classes and existence as the undead are brought into alignment as 'fates worse than death', made all the more terrifying by Le Fanu's ability to reproduce the pleasures of seduction and the modes of grooming alongside an implication of an evil eternal life.

Incidentally, the Hammer Horror 'Karnstein Trilogy' based on 'Carmilla' is camp fun with 'The Vampire Lovers' (1970), the first in the series, not quite faithful to the original story and a 'cult favourite' if only because it goes wonderfully overboard with its portrayal of the lesbian erotic. show less