Carmilla

By Sheridan Le Fanu

Sink your teeth into the cult classic vampire novella that inspired Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Fear sweeps the countryside as people fall victim to a strange illness.

After a peculiar accident, beautiful Mircalla becomes a ward at Laura’s family home.

Soon, friendship blooms between the mysterious Mircalla and curious Laura.

Love is in the air, but so is something deadly.

Will Mircalla’s secret cost Laura her life?

Carmilla, originally published in 1872, is one of the first vampire novels ever written, predating Dracula by twenty-six years. Carmilla, with its themes of vampirism and homosexuality, shocked the standards and stereotypes for women set in the Victorian era. Today, Carmilla is considered the original archetype of female and LGBTQ vampires, and Le Fanu’s influence is seen throughout vampire fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781680573787

Sheridan Le Fanu

J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873) was an Irish writer who helped develop the ghost story genre in the nineteenth century. Born to a family of writers, Le Fanu released his first works in 1838 in Dublin University Magazine, which he would go on to edit and publish in 1861. Some of Le Fanu’s most famous Victorian Gothic works include Carmilla, Uncle Silas, and In a Glass Darkly. His writing has inspired other great authors of horror and thriller literature such as Bram Stoker and M. R. James.

Book preview

Carmilla

CARMILLA

JOSEPH SHERIDAN LE FANU

FOREWORD BY

MARK LESLIE LEFEBVRE

EDITED BY

SAVANNAH STUTTGEN

WordFire Press

Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

Originally published in 1872. This work is in the public domain.

This new edition edited by Savannah Stuttgen

Foreword copyright © 2022 by Mark Leslie Lefebvre

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

The ebook edition of this book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. The ebook may not be re-sold or given away. If you would like to share the ebook edition with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

EBook ISBN: 978-1-68057-378-7

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-68057-377-0

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-68057-379-4

Illustrations by David Henry Friston and Michael Fitzgerald

Cover design by Savannah Stuttgen and Allyson Longueira

Cover artwork image by Vera Petruk | Shutterstock

Published by WordFire Press, LLC

PO Box 1840

Monument CO 80132

Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta, Publishers

WordFire Press Edition 2022

Printed in the USA

Join our WordFire Press Readers Group for new projects, and giveaways. Sign up at wordfirepress.com

To Jon. Obviously.

CONTENTS

Foreword

Prologue

1. An Early Fright

2. A Guest

3. We Compare Notes

4. Her Habits—A Saunter

5. A Wonderful Likeness

6. A Very Strange Agony

7. Descending

8. Search

9. The Doctor

10. Bereaved

11. The Story

12. A Petition

13. The Woodman

14. The Meeting

15. Ordeal and Execution

16. Conclusion

Illustrations

Publisher’s Note

About the Author

About the Editor

About the Illustrators

WordFire Classics

FOREWORD

THE FATHER OF MODERN VAMPIRE FICTION AND THE MOTHER OF VAMPIRES

Bram Stoker is often heralded as the writer responsible for initially popularizing vampire fiction with his 1897 novel Dracula—arguably the most well-known vampire in literature and popular culture. But Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla pre-dates that text by more than a quarter century and is considered to be a significantly influential text on Stoker’s own vampire novel.

Originally serialized in The Dark Blue (a London-based literary magazine) in late 1871 and early 1872, the novella was reprinted in 1872 in Le Fanu’s story collection In a Glass Darkly.

While Le Fanu wrote in many different genres, he was primarily known for his horror fiction. Carmilla, along with Uncle Silas (1864) and The House by the Churchyard (1863) are among his most well-known works. Le Fanu specialized in atmosphere, tone, and dramatic effect rather than shock horror, and was considered to be an enormous influence on other horror writers. Ghost story author M.R. James described Le Fanu as absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories.

Carmilla includes all the traits commonly associated with Gothic literature, such as an old castle, a shadowy or supernatural figure, an ominous or supernatural presence and feel, and a dark, atmospheric and mysterious setting. The novel is presented as part of a casebook of occult detective Dr. Hesselius, and the story is narrated as a first-person account by Laura, the novel’s teenage protagonist. The story is set in Styria, a state in the southeast of Austria. And it is also set against a culture with strict moral laws, sexual repression, and very tangible religious and supernatural fears.

Female empowerment and lesbianism are two strong motifs in Carmilla. In a restrained and repressed Victorian society, Le Fanu struck out against the then current view of women as mere possessions of men, and with a need for their protection. General Spielsdorf and Laura’s unnamed father are, for example, painted as both unproductive and helpless. This portrays the female characters as equal, if not superior, to the men.

In contrast to male vampires, Carmilla herself is seen as establishing a foundational relationship with her prey. She is emotionally and even physically involved with her victims, and much of the story centers around the very complex relationship and its thinly veiled lesbian undertones. Laura is both drawn to and repulsed by the vampire; she both wishes to succumb to as well as withdraw from her feelings for this most strange and beautiful creature. Carmilla is effectively the antithesis of both a male-centered world and what later became a male-centric vampire genre.

When Stoker released Dracula more than twenty-five years later, he was most definitely influenced by Le Fanu’s work. Some of the similarities between Carmilla and Dracula include the fact that both tales are told in the first person, the symptoms described are alike, the titular antagonists pretend to be descendants of older nobles, there are parallels in the vampire experts of Baron Vordenburg and Van Helsing, the descriptions of the title character in Carmilla and of Lucy in Dracula are similarly uncanny, and both women sleepwalk.

Of course, Le Fanu didn’t just influence Stoker’s most notable work. Carmilla has inspired numerous other books, films, songs, comic books, video games, radio and television shows, and stage performances.

Author Anne Rice cited Carmilla as an inspiration for her ground-breaking The Vampire Chronicles series that began with the 1976 novel Interview with the Vampire. Authors David Brin, Kyle Marffin, Rachel Klein, Ro McNulty, Kim Neuman, Robert Statzer, and Erika McGann have also all drawn upon Le Fanu’s female vampire.

Films such as Vampyr (1932), Dracula’s Daughter (1936), The Vampire Lovers (1970), Lesbian Vampire Killers (2009), The Moth Diaries (2011), The Unwanted (2014), The Curse of Styria (2014) and the 1963 Italian adaptation La cripta e l'incubo (Crypt of the Vampire) were all inspired by, influenced, or directly adapted from the novel. A 2014 Canadian single-frame web series, Carmilla, was a modern adaption of Le Fanu’s novel, and that spun off to The Carmilla Movie in 2017.

And you, dear reader, are about to experience why this 1871 novel, its characters, atmosphere and persistent motifs are all still most relevant and influential today, more than 150 years after its first appearance.

I hope that you, like Savannah and me, and countless other readers over the generations, enjoy the experience of allowing yourself to be absorbed into and be captivated by this most delightfully atmospheric and seductive novel.

—Mark Leslie Lefebvre

January 12, 2022

PROLOGUE

Upon a paper attached to the Narrative which follows, Doctor Hesselius has written a rather elaborate note, which he accompanies with a reference to his Essay on the strange subject which the MS. illuminates.

This mysterious subject he treats, in that Essay, with his usual learning and acumen, and with remarkable directness and condensation. It will form but one volume of the series of that extraordinary man’s collected papers.

As I publish the case, in this volume, simply to interest the laity, I shall forestall the intelligent lady, who relates it, in nothing; and after due consideration, I have determined, therefore, to abstain from presenting any précis of the learned Doctor’s reasoning, or extract from his statement on a subject which he describes as involving, not improbably, some of the profoundest arcana of our dual existence, and its intermediates.

I was anxious on discovering this paper to reopen the correspondence commenced by Doctor Hesselius, so many years before, with a person so clever and careful as his informant seems to have been. Much to my regret, however, I found that she had died in the interval.

She, probably, could have added little to the Narrative which she communicates in the following pages, with, so far as I can pronounce, such conscientious particularity.

1

AN EARLY FRIGHT

In Styria, we, though by no means magnificent people, inhabit a castle, or schloss. A small income, in that part of the world, goes a great way. Eight or nine hundred a year does wonders. Scantily enough ours would have answered among wealthy people at home. My father is English, and I bear an English name, although I never saw England. But here, in this lonely and primitive place, where everything is so marvelously cheap, I really don’t see how ever so much more money would at all materially add to our comforts, or even luxuries.

My father was in the Austrian service, and retired upon a pension and his patrimony, and purchased this feudal residence, and the small estate on which it stands, a bargain.

Nothing can be more picturesque or solitary. It stands on a slight eminence in a forest. The road, very old and narrow, passes in front of