By Dublin-born Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-73), this was published in 1872.

And it's irrepressibly Gothic... I've been dabbling in this genre for a while (most recently with Truman Capote's Other Voices Other Rooms). And any list of Gothic recommendations will include this book... (See, for example, here and here...)


Available on Gutenberg

The rest of this post will be full of spoilers. Not that it's not clear, just a few pages in, what is going on in this story... But it will be even clearer after you've read this, so beware.

Laura is our key narrator (after a prologue explaining that she is an "informant" of Dr Hesselius, who has sent the manuscript to the author -- the double remove is reminiscent of The Turn of the Screw, albeit much briefer).

And we open with all the elements we need for a Gothic novel. We have a picturesque and solitary castle in the Styrian district of Austria; it's situated in a forest, and near a ruined village. And, of course, we have a beautiful and motherless young woman. She's Laura. Dad, who's really a pretty nice old chap, is English, but he has been in the "Austrian service", and now that he is retired, he has stayed on the region where his late wife came from. Laura has never been to England, and father and daughter are happy to be in this "lonely and primitive place, where everything is so marvellously cheap" (I love this little detail...). There are staff, needless to say, including two governesses.


Mariazell is in Styria. Pictures from 1989

Laura was 19 at the time of the events she relates. She's now 27. The first thing she recounts, however, is a strange experience from her childhood. She wakes to see a young woman, who lies down beside her in her bed. It's obviously not a scary figure, as she goes to sleep again, but she is "wakened by a sensation as if two needles ran into my breast very deep at the same moment". None of the various explanations offered reallys adds up.

But stranger things are coming. First, there's a death. General Spielsdorf (a friend of Laura's father's) was guardian to a niece (Mlle Rheinfeldt). She was to have come to stay with Laura and her father, but she unexpectedly passes away.

Then an accident takes place in front of the castle. The moon is out. The mood is mysterious. And a carriage appears. It crashes. The older passenger insists she must continue her journey, her (unknown) business being very pressing. She asks if the younger woman, Carmilla, can be left at the castle to recuperate, but she insists that no further information as to their identity and business will be forthcoming.

And Laura is indescribably shocked to realize that Carmilla's is the face she saw all those years before in the vision that spooked her as a child. Carmilla too claims to have seen Laura's face in a dream, and gives details that sound very much like the same scenario. Aha, so these two have some kind of cosmic connection...

She's beautiful, this guest, and she's obviously intelligent. But she is extraordinarily languid, and she has some strange habits. She never appears until the afternoon, for example, and she's very keen on locking her doors at night. She has no religious feeling, and no trace of empathy (she reacts very coolly, for example, to the demise of a ranger's daughter, one of a wave of young women's deaths the neighbourhood has started to experience). Meanwhile, a wandering amulet-seller has noticed that she has a very sharp tooth, an observation that pleases her not one jot... Then there's another uncanny thing. When the picture of Mircalla (Countess Karnstein, dated 1698), comes back from the restorer, the face is seen to be the spit and image of Carmilla's...


Sheridan

You'd think by now that Laura would be starting to get bad vibes off this woman, especially given Carmilla's dark talk of wounds, love, sacrifice, and blood... But while often repelled by her guest's intensity, Laura is also still fascinated by her.

One night, Laura dreams of a large black animal, which springs onto her bed. Again she has the sensation of being pierced by two needles. She wakes up, and sees a female figure standing at the foot of her bed, which then exits via the door.

Laura starts to experience lassitude and languor: "Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that I was slowly sinking took gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome, possession of me." In her dreams, it's as though warm lips are kissing her, and moving inexorably to her throat...

Carmilla is more devoted than ever. But the household has become aware that the guest goes out at night... Sleepwalking, says Dad, unimaginatively. But he's sufficiently worried about Laura's condition to summon a doctor, who leaves instructions that she's never to be left alone.

Then the General turns up, and all hell breaks loose. He announces that he wants to take Laura and her father to the ruined village of Karnstein. On the way, he explains to them the circumstances in which his niece died. They're strikingly similar to Laura's case. There's an incident that ends up with an older woman leaving a younger woman, called Millarca, in his care; there's a total lack of detail about the journey the older woman is making; there's the friendship that his niece feels for their guest; and there's her rapidly worsening illness, complete with sensations of being pierced... The General called in experts, one of whom recognizes that the young woman has been suffering the attentions of a vampire... And the General himself witnesses, but cannot forestall, an attack that leads to the young woman's death.



Meanwhile, our little party has arrived at the Karnstein palace ruins. "It was a bad family," says the General, "and here its bloodstained annals were written." This is the source of the scourge that killed his niece, he says, and now he wants to attack the monster at its root. Long ago, there had been revenants in the deserted village. They'd been tracked, "and extinguished in the usual way". But despite all this -- with "so many graves opened, and so many vampires deprived of their horrible animation" -- the village continued to suffer. Then a Moravian nobleman tried to help. The tomb of Mircalla was relocated, but the body had been removed.

At this point, Carmilla and one of the governesses join the party that's already grouped in the shadowy chapel. Feeling herself menaced by the hatchet in the General's hand, Carmilla grips his wrist with superhuman strength, disarming him instantly. She escapes.

Carmilla; Millarca; Mircalla -- we realize, of course, that they're all part of the same phenomenon. Eventually, Baron Vordenburg, a vampire expert, is called in. He has studied the stories that proliferate in Upper and Lower Styria, Moravia, Silesia, "Turkish Serbia", Poland, and Russia. Through him we learn that vampires can arise after the suicide of a wicked person. The vampire then visits living people, who die, and themselves become vampires... And they do indeed have fearsomely strong hands...

The Victorians must have had strong stomachs, because we're then treated to a full-on description of the end of the being that has been fascinating and terrifying our protagonists: "The grave of the Countess Mircalla was opened; and the General and my father recognized each his perfidious and beautiful guest, in the face now disclosed to view. The features, though a hundred and fifty years had passed since her funeral, were tinted with the warmth of life. Her eyes were open; no cadaverous smell exhaled from the coffin. The two medical men, one officially present, the other on the part of the promoter of the inquiry, attested the marvelous fact that there was a faint but appreciable respiration, and a corresponding action of the heart. The limbs were perfectly flexible, the flesh elastic; and the leaden coffin floated with blood, in which to a depth of seven inches, the body lay immersed."

What has to be done is done: A sharp stake is driven through the heart; the body is decapitated; the head and body are burned; the ashes are scattered on the river... And Bob's your uncle. The area has never been bothered again.

Poor Laura never quite recovers, however. The book concludes: "The following Spring my father took me a tour through Italy. We remained away for more than a year. It was long before the terror of recent events subsided; and to this hour the image of Carmilla returns to memory with ambiguous alternations -- sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend I saw in the ruined church; and often from a reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing room door."



***

Of course, it's lurid. But it's undeniably a good read. We know, before Laura knows, what this Carmilla is up to, and that discrepancy of understanding ramps up the tension nicely.

As a vampire story, it's highly rated, and more generally, it's considered "one of the masterworks of Victorian Gothic". Carmilla had a definite influence on Dracula. (Kellermeyer argues that Bram Stoker's more famous vampire tome is an amalgam of at least four Le Fanu stories, one of them this one.)

Probably the most-discussed aspect of the story is the overtly intimate relationship that Carmilla and Laura share. I'm always cautious about reading modern understandings of sexuality into older texts, but the language here is so specific that it's really hard to put it down to authorial innocence. Examples:

"Sometimes after an hour of apathy, my strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardor of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet over-powering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips traveled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, 'You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one for ever.' Then she had thrown herself back in her chair, with her small hands over her eyes, leaving me trembling." (In fact, there's such an obvious energy emanating from this young woman that Laura even wonders whether she's actually "a boyish lover" who has infiltrated the house in disguise.)

Or there's this exchange, exemplifying the kind of language that embarrasses and frightens Laura, who is discomfited by what she calls Carmilla's infatuations, "her crazy talk and looks":

"She drew her arm closer about my waist, and let her pretty head sink upon my shoulder. 'How romantic you are, Carmilla,' I said...
"She kissed me silently.
"'I am sure, Carmilla, you have been in love; that there is, at this moment, an affair of the heart going on.'
"'I have been in love with no one, and never shall,' she whispered, 'unless it should be with you.'
"How beautiful she looked in the moonlight!
"Shy and strange was the look with which she quickly hid her face in my neck and hair, with tumultuous sighs, that seemed almost to sob, and pressed in mine a hand that trembled.
"Her soft cheek was glowing against mine. 'Darling, darling,' she murmured, 'I live in you; and you would die for me, I love you so.'
"I started from her."

It's not really surprising that critics have seen in all this an exposition of repressed sexuality in an era when same-sex relationships couldn't be openly expressed.

It's a curiously sympathetic portrait. She may be a destructive vampire, but there's something vulnerable about Carmilla. It's as though Le Fanu is reminding us that she didn't CHOOSE to be a vampire; and now she's lugged along from one blood-sucking scenario to the next by this mother figure who almost acts as a pimp... "Queer theorists have found in her a literary martyr who is drawn to kill not by wickedness, but by the constricting demands of her patriarchal society which prevent her appetites from being expressed openly: it is the closeting of Carmilla, they argue, that results in the vampirism which haunts her repressed community."

The convergence of the emotions of desire and fear has become "one of the most well-established tropes of the [Gothic] genre".


The Vampire, by Philip Burne-Jones, 1897

***

But there's lots more hiding in here, apparently. As well as arguably offering a challenge to the patriarchal systems of the time (both Laura and Carmilla, in their different ways, demonstrate considerable agency, and we wonder whether this is why Carmilla is so much less known than Dracula...), the text is also open to other social and political interpretations.

That the predators come from a supernatural nobility that refuses to die can be seen as a comment on class; and it's interesting that the predation methods are also distinguished along class lines: "Her two means of killing -- she quickly throttles and consumes peasant girls but slowly woos and drains noblewomen -- are analogous to how sexual abuse affects women of the two classes (lower class women were often violently raped without much effort at concealment, while upper class women needed to be carefully seduced and manipulated)."

Some have also seen in this story an allegorical representation of Ireland: "In this reading, Carmilla represents the allure of the English nobility -- a class which was silently using and manipulating its Anglo-Irish following, while more overtly slaughtering the Irish peasants around them. Like Laura’s father, Le Fanu’s fellow Tories were only too quick to blame the Great Famine on anything other than the beautiful, dark-haired princess (Victoria) who had so enchanted them..."

***

So where did all this come from? Drawing on Jamieson Ridenhour, this blogger quotes three sources: Firstly, vampires have long featured in the folklore of certain areas (but these specimens were neither aristocratic nor glamorous); secondly, the story also draws on a femme fatale tradition (Eve, Lilith, Coleridge's Christabel, Keats's Belle Dame sans Merci...); and then we have the "literary vampire" (exponents are John Polidori, for example, or James Malcolm Rymer, with his gargantuan penny-dreadful series called Varney the Vampire).

And then, most chillingly of all, there is the terrifying Countess Elizabeth Bathory, "the most prolific female killer on record", who literally bathed in her victims' blood...

Sheesh... Makes Carmilla seem quite run-of-the-mill...