Carmilla

Carmilla was serialised before appearing as the undisputed gem of the 1872 anthology In a Glass Darkly. Laura, only daughter of an English gentleman living in Austria, welcomes the randomly appearing young stranger, Carmilla, without a trace of fear. Vampire signals appear and proliferate in the surrounding countryside, at the castle and even on the bodies of the young girls. The mysterious and exquisitely beautiful friend overwhelms Laura with such ardent declarations of love that she at one point persuades herself that her suitor is a young man disquised as a woman. Despite all these signs Laura, who should have been protected by her father and two solid, amiable governesses, Laura, apathetic and vanquished by an excess of love, and by the poor monster - half woman half beast, half dead half alive - lavishing it upon her, this Laura lets herself be loved, and slowly assassinated, by Carmilla. Carmilla is a bridge between the English gothic novel, full of Otranto castles, gloomy chambers, underground passages and pallid Italian convent girls, and the complex, analytical Dracula, which it precedes by several decades. The fear we experience as we read young Laura's tale is not a fear of the unknown, as it would have been for Le Fanu's contemporaries for whom vampires were an exotic novelty. No, modern readers of Carmilla shudder with the dread of a known death approaching... Vampires in literature: In 1872, the unfortunate creature had only appeared twice in British literature, in works by Polidori and James Rymer; thus Le Fanu was a pioneer - what is more, Carmilla was the first female and first lesbian vampire. That most famous vampire story, Bram Stokers' masterly Dracula, was only written in 1897. The other works of the author include: Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess, and Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter.