Carmilla

About this book

Carmilla is a short Gothic novel by the Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. It was serialized in the magazine The Dark Blue in 1871 and 1872 and then collected in his volume In a Glass Darkly in 1872, framed as a case from the papers of the occult doctor Martin Hesselius. It appeared a quarter of a century before Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Stoker, a fellow Dubliner, is generally thought to have known it.

The book is read today for two reasons. It is one of the earliest full vampire narratives in English, and it established several conventions that later writers kept: the aristocratic vampire with an old family name, the slow decline of the victim, the learned expert who arrives to explain. It is also unusual for its period in that both the vampire and her victim are young women, and the attraction between them is written openly enough that the story has become a reference point in discussions of lesbian themes in nineteenth-century fiction.

The story

Laura, the narrator, lives with her widowed father in a lonely castle in Styria, in what is now Austria. She is nineteen and has almost no company. A carriage accident on the road near the castle leaves a young woman, Carmilla, in their care while her mother continues on urgent business. Laura is startled to recognize Carmilla’s face from a dream she had as a small child, and Carmilla says she has dreamed of Laura too.

The two become close. Carmilla is affectionate, secretive about her family, and sleeps late. Meanwhile, young women in the surrounding villages begin to sicken and die, and Laura herself starts to have disturbing dreams and to lose strength. Her father, a doctor and an old family friend with a grief of his own each take a hand in finding out what is happening.

Themes and historical context

Le Fanu was a Dublin journalist and newspaper proprietor who wrote mystery and ghost fiction for much of his career. Carmilla belongs to his last years, after his wife’s death, when he was reclusive and produced his best-known supernatural work. The setting in Styria and the apparatus of old families, ruined chapels and a traveling expert on vampires drew on Central European vampire lore that had been circulating in English for decades.

The central relationship is the story’s main subject. Carmilla’s declarations of love to Laura, and Laura’s mixture of attraction and revulsion, are described in a way that Victorian readers could take as Gothic excess and modern readers take as something more direct. Critics have also read the book in terms of illness, since the decline of the victims resembles consumption, and in terms of the isolation of unmarried women in remote houses with no one to confide in.

The framing as a case study for Dr. Hesselius, who also presides over the other stories in In a Glass Darkly, gives the tale a surface of medical and scholarly explanation. How much that explanation actually accounts for is left to the reader.

Who should read it

Carmilla is about 28,000 words, a long evening’s read. The prose is Victorian and formal but not difficult, and the pace is slow in the way Gothic fiction of the period usually is: the horror comes from accumulation rather than shock. Readers who go on to Dracula will see how much Stoker borrowed and how much he changed. It also makes a good first Le Fanu, before the longer Uncle Silas or the other stories in In a Glass Darkly.

Edition notes

The Project Gutenberg edition was prepared by Suzanne Shell, Sjaani and PG Distributed Proofreaders. It presents Carmilla as a standalone text rather than as part of In a Glass Darkly.