Carmilla (Heathen Edition)
Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873) was an Irish author of Gothic, mystery, and horror fiction. In 1872, he published the Gothic novella Carmilla, which is noted as one of the earliest works of vampire fiction, predating Bram Stoker's Dracula by 26 years, and whose enduring influence can be recognized in every modern vampire tale. Serialized first in the literary magazine The Dark Blue, then collected in Le Fanu's short story collection In a Glass Darkly, the narrative is presented as part of the casebook of one Dr. Martin Hesselius, whose departure from medical orthodoxy rank him as one of the first occult detectives in literature, while the story itself is narrated by a young woman named Laura who is seduced and preyed upon by a female vampire: the novella's namesake Carmilla.
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"J. Sheridan Le Fanu's 1872 novella Carmilla, a superbly literate, beautifully crafted story by a man who, like Stoker, was an Irishman." -Blood Thirst: 100 Years of Vampire Fiction
"Next to Poe, or equal with Poe, among men with weird ideas, and skilled in presenting them was the late
Mr. Sheridan Le Fanu." -Current Literature
"The most famous lesbian vampire story, and beautifully executed in a poetic-turned-prose style with a great deal of erotic collusion on the part of J. Sheridan Le Fanu." -Blood & Roses: The Vampire in 19th Century Literature
"The achievement of Sheridan Le Fanu was very different indeed and still commands our attention by its emotive force and often macabre, sinister effects . . . Dracula was influenced, obviously, by Le Fanu's vampire story Carmilla." -A. Norman Jeffares, Anglo-Irish Literature
"The genius of the late Mr. Sheridan Le Fanu was also of a chill and curdling nature. No author more frequently caused a reader to look over his shoulder in the dead hour of the night. Carmilla is a tale that every parent should make haste not to place in the hands of the young. Neither Poe nor Richepin ever invented anything more horrible than the dusky, undulating nocturnal shape of her who was a fair woman by daylight and an insatiate fiend at night." -The Saturday Review
"The vampire began to appear in English literature after 1800, mainly as a poetical symbol of exploitation, or an ill-defined occult threat. It achieved its first real literary significance with the publication of Sheridan Le Fanu's novelette, Carmilla, in 1872, the direct forerunner of Bram Stoker's Dracula, with which it shares the distinction of being the most famous work of the occult, and the most frequently and shamelessly plagiarized work of fiction of any kind ever written." -Glen St. John Barclay, Anatomy of Horror
"The picturesque legend of the vampire has been well preserved in English literature. Two of the most imaginative stories in this vein-Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu, and Dracula by Dram Stoker-both have their scenic setting in the Austrian dominions, demonstrating the fact that their authors were well acquainted with the fact that vampires were indigenous to Styria and the Carpathians." -S. M. Ellis, The Bookman
"Le Fanu's Carmilla, the first really successful vampire story, stands as a paradigm of the transformation of the incoherent numinous elements of faded Gothic into the enduring form of the modern supernatural horror story . . . the sinister lesbian eroticism is (considering the times) startlingly explicit." -The Blood is the Life: Vampires in Literature
"Carmilla, however, is one of Le Fanu's very best things and certainly the finest vampire story in literature. It is a peculiar mixture in which an exceedingly subtle, psychological study of two young girls is combined with a straight-forward horror-mystery. The masterful manner in which Carmilla importunes her friend and would-be victim and the whole feverish relationship between them puts the story on a far higher plane than the average uncanny tale. Le Fanu's insight goes straight to the heart of the perverted infantility which is the root of the vampire myth, and such is his psychological realism that one scarcely needs to perform any suspension of disbelief. He rings a bell in the psyche which cruder practitioners, such as the author of Dracula, can never touch." -Maurice Richardson, Novels of Mystery from the Victorian Age
