Carmilla: A Vampyre Tale

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 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 show more and haunting quality that makes it a worthy read for anyone who enjoys the genre. show less

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla feels more Gothic to me than many books that are traditionally placed in the Gothic genre. This is a novel of castles, graveyards, ruined villages, misty morning walks, family histories, and ancient evils that refuse to stay buried. The atmosphere is the star of the book.

Modern readers come to Carmilla already knowing that Carmilla is a vampire, but surprisingly, that doesn't hurt the story. Le Fanu hints very early that something is wrong. Laura's childhood dream, the mysterious illness affecting young women, Carmilla's strange behavior, her disappearances, and her refusal to explain her past all point in the same direction. Laura herself repeatedly recognizes that something about Carmilla is show more unsettling, but she lacks the freedom, authority, and social standing to investigate those feelings. Instead, she does what many people do when confronted with something they cannot explain: she continues.

What makes the novella work is that the central question is not "What is Carmilla?" but "Will Carmilla get away with it again?" The story gradually reveals that Laura is only the latest victim in a cycle that has likely repeated for generations. The suspense comes from whether anyone will recognize the pattern before it is too late.

One of the most interesting aspects of the novel is how Victorian politeness becomes part of the horror. Everyone notices warning signs, but no one wants to be rude. Carmilla's refusal to discuss her past is accepted. Her strange moods are tolerated. Her disappearances are excused. She succeeds not because the people around her are foolish, but because they are determined to behave properly. In a strange way, they almost out-polite themselves.

I also read Carmilla less as a romance and more as a story of vampiric fascination. By the end, Laura herself suggests that what she felt was not love but something darker and more supernatural. Whether readers agree with her is open to interpretation, but I found that explanation convincing. Carmilla feels less like a person pursuing a relationship and more like an ancient predator using intimacy as a means of access. The atmosphere, the history, and the centuries-old cycle mattered more to me than any romantic reading.

As a piece of Gothic fiction, Carmilla remains remarkably effective. The mystery may be obvious, but the mood is unforgettable. The castles, forests, graveyards, and lingering sense of the past pressing against the present create a world that feels genuinely haunted. More than a vampire story, Carmilla is a story about place, memory, and the fear that some evils have been walking these roads for far longer than anyone remembers. 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, 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 show more 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 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 show more 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

I've heard about this short book for a while now, an early vampire tale from the 1870s, beating out Bram Stoker's Dracula by a quarter century. I kept intending to get around to reading it, and now a new graphic novel adaptation I want to read has finally prompted me to check this out.

It's a pretty straightforward horror story, with the narrator, Laura, telling about the time a young woman named Carmilla became a guest in her home under odd circumstances. Laura feels herself drawn to and yet troubled by Carmilla's languid beauty and weird habit of sleeping late in a locked room. And then local women start dying and Laura has strange visitations in the night that leave her weakened and fading. Hmmmmm . . .

The narrative is slowed by show more other characters showing up to tell long stories that are supposed to seem unrelated but are obviously highly relevant.

Due to it's time of origin the story comes off as problematic by queer coding the villain to lean into the psycho killer lesbian trope. But the edition I read has been edited by Carmen Maria Machado, and she plays with the meaning of the story in her introduction (which engages in a little literary hoax to add to the fun) and intrudes in the story itself via footnotes with some pertinent information and cutting asides. (By the way, the introduction and footnote #7 should have spoiler alerts and should be read after the story if such spoilers bother you.)

Machado also edits the original text "to reflect a more modern grammatical sensibility where necessary." For example the opening line, "In Styria, we, though by no means magnificent people, inhabit a castle, or schloss." becomes, "In Styria, we—though by no means magnificent people—inhabit a manor-house."

If you prefer to read the original, the full text is in public domain and available online:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10007/10007-h/10007-h.htm show less

I liked this book a lot, hence the rating. However, I absolutely hate the edition “edited” by Carmen Maria Machado. This was my first time reading Carmilla, and this was the copy I got from the library, which gave no indication anywhere on the cover or the publication information that this was anything besides a normal edition of the book with an introduction and scholarly footnotes. It is NOT THAT.

The introduction creates a new framing device wherein Joseph Sheridan LeFanu’s work was not only based on, but was ripped entirely and directly from, letters written by a real historical woman. It explains that LeFanu “drank of what was not his” and attributes everything good about his writing to this fictional woman, Veronica show more Hausle, and claims that LeFanu actually edited the letters to be less gay and complicated, citing a bunch of made up quotes that wouldn’t fit anywhere into the book. It implies that the real Carmilla was actually probably innocent and that LeFanu edited it to reflect incorrect sensibilities. It ends by saying that “I wished this edition to bear LeFanu’s shame. I wish the reader to come to the book with a complete understanding of its inadequacy.” It’s such a weird “fuck you” to the author whose work she is editing and introducing, and someone like me who doesn’t know the first thing about Carmilla might take this introduction at face value unless they do additional research. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that this lack of clarity is irresponsible or maybe even immoral.

Now that I have finished the book, I do understand what she was doing. She says that the real Carmilla was “Marcia Marén,” which is an anagram of Carmen Maria. In the book it is revealed that Carmilla can change her name, but it must retain all of the same letters, due to vampire rules. So, the big metanarrative of this edition is that Carmen Maria Machado was the actual real Carmilla and that’s why she knows the things that she puts in the footnotes. I get it. I still think it’s done badly, and honestly comes across as disrespectful to the reader and to the author. There is no indication anywhere in the entire edition that this is not an edit, but is in fact a species of rewrite due to the fact that Machado added an entire extra framing device. This is essentially a toned-down “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” style venture where a new author gets to stick stuff into a classic novel that she thinks is cool, but it is marketed with no indication of this whatsoever, so you think you’re just reading the original Carmilla. The footnotes add absolutely nothing: in fact, they detract heavily from the very tense Gothic tone which LeFanu was utilizing with obvious purpose.

Machado interrupts a description of a river that appears red from the reflected sunset to say, “imagine it, reader: a river of blood,” like she thinks that the reader is stupid and will not be able to understand the subtext of a red river in a book about vampires.

She interrupts the journey to the location where the ultimate conflict of the story will take place to tell us about all of the fanciful creatures which apparently inhabit the forest they are travelling through, including “roguish-but-decent thieves and brigands, fairies, two different species of elves, talking deer, and sentient boulders,” among other things. That moment in particular was so jarring that it felt like I was trying to read a gothic horror story while Carmen Maria Machado leaned over my shoulder and insisted that I was actually reading Tales from Moominvalley.

Also, sometimes her little additions don’t even make any sense, narratively. When the General is telling everyone his sad tale, he describes Carmilla’s “mother” as someone who knew many things about him, indicating to him that they must have been friends at some point, which is part of what convinced him to take Carmilla in. Machado has kindly added a footnote which says “Though he does not say so here, the mysterious woman in fact laid bare one of the general’s greatest and most hidden secrets: his lover, Kurt, whom he had served with decades before. Not only did she know of Kurt’s existence and of the dimensions of their relationship, she knew the words Kurt had said to him in parting, which he had softly dropped in the shell of his ear: ‘I already miss our season.’” How on earth would this help the general accept Carmilla as a guest? If she had revealed not only that she knew something incredibly scandalous about him, but that she knew specific details that it would be impossible for nearly anyone to access, it would not convince him that they had been friends at some point and that he should take her daughter in and trust her. It would make him angry and guarded and suspicious. This doesn’t make any goddamn sense.

Carmen Maria Machado obviously just wanted to write Carmilla self-insert fanfiction. Which is all well and good, but you can’t sell people your fanfiction and insist that it’s just the original book! It’s not cricket! She made my reading experience confusing and frustrating, and she ruined the pacing and tone. I have never seen a real-life Charles Kinbote before today. Astonishing.

Update: I just found out that Machado also edited the text of the book, changing a lot of words and sometimes entire sentence structures, and generally dumbing down the text. So now I feel like I haven’t even read it and I’m going to have to seek out an ACTUAL copy of the book so that I can READ THE BOOK I THOUGHT I WAS READING. What a fucking joke. I can’t believe anyone thought this was a good idea. I’m taking In the Dream House off of my tbr. Machado is now my sworn blood enemy. show less

You have heard, no doubt, of the appalling superstition that prevails in Upper and Lower Styria, in Moravia, Silesia, in Turkish Serbia, in Poland, even in Russia; the superstition, so we must call it, of the Vampire.

This was a delight. Atmospheric, sensual, brooding, and wonderfully written, a true gem of Gothic literature. Carmilla manages to retain its spookiness all these decades later, because even though we’ve reached a level of vampire supersaturation in the media that J. Sheridan Le Fanu probably wouldn’t have thought possible, the central horror of the story—inviting someone into your home who is not what they appear to be—is still scary.

This is also a situation where the thin line between wanting someone and wanting show more to be someone that often exists for gay people is used to great effect.

”I wonder whether you feel as strangely drawn towards me as I do to you...”

There is much discussion about just how gay this novella is, but I’m not interested so much in analysing the exact authorial intent as I am with praising how well the final result has turned out. Carmilla is drawn towards Laura, both out of loneliness and desire, and at the same time she is bound to consume and destroy her. Laura represents both Carmilla’s idealised love interest and the person that she wishes she could be (innocent, mortal, guileless... heterosexual?) and yet knows she can never return to. Finding the woman you most want to be, falling in love with her, destroying her, being destroyed. Psychosexual to the max. The tragic erotic potential of the vampire is fully realised here, despite the relative chasteness of the story itself.

I have to laud Le Fanu’s prose too, because his descriptions—especially of landscapes—are so evocative I could picture them all in my mind with incredible clarity. The writing is wonderful the whole way through, always with a current of unease and feverishness, and even though you’ll see the ending coming from a mile away, getting there is great fun.

Read it for free here! show less