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Carmilla
Spine #38
Author
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Translator
First Edition
1872
Heathen Edition
April 6, 2023
Refreshed
February 12, 2024
Pages
128
Heathen Genera
Creepy AF
Paperback ISBN
978-1-948316-38-5
Hardcover ISBN
978-1-963228-38-0
"My dear child began to lose her looks and health, and that in a manner so mysterious, and even horrible, that I became thoroughly frightened.
"She was at first visited by appalling dreams; then, as she fancied, by a specter, sometimes in the shape of a beast, indistinctly seen, walking round the foot of her bed, from side to side. Lastly came sensations. One, not unpleasant, but very peculiar, she said, resembled the flow of an icy stream against her breast. At a later time, she felt something like a pair of large needles pierce her, a little below the throat, with a very sharp pain. A few nights after, followed a gradual and convulsive sense of strangulation; then came unconsciousness."
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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"The first really successful vampire story."
The Blood is the Life: Vampires in Literature
Heathenry
Contents
Praise
Details
Preview
Heathenry
Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla was first serialized in four parts in the monthly London-based literary magazine The Dark Blue as follows:
Chapters 1–3 were published in December 1871.
Then in 1872, chapters 4–6 were published in January, chapters 7–10 were published in February, and chapters 11–16 were published in March.
Afterward, it was included as one of five Gothic horror and mystery short stories published in Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly, also published in 1872.
That entire work, including Carmilla, is presented as a small portion of cases investigated by one Dr. Martin Hesselius, whose departures from medical orthodoxy rank him as one of the first occult detectives in literature.
Carmilla is also considered one of the first works of vampire fiction in literature, predating the most recognized book of its genre—Bram Stoker’s Dracula—by 26 years.
And it is probably-most-definitely the very first work of lesbian vampire fiction in literature, which more refined folk refer to as “sapphic,” a term derived from the Greek poet Sappho who lived on the Greek island of Lesbos and wrote love poems to women.
Of course, we Heathens had to ask the question: If Carmilla is one of the first vampire stories in literature and a direct influence on Stoker’s Dracula, then who or what inspired Le Fanu?
Based on our research, it seems there is no simple answer to that question. However, in Chapter 16, Le Fanu specifically references four very real books that a character studied while investigating vampirism, so that’s a start. Another very likely source was the 1751 work Treatise on the Apparitions of Spirits and on Vampires or Revenants of Hungary, Moravia, et al. by an Abbot monk known as Dom Calmet,1Antoine Augustin Calmet (1672–1757) was a French Benedictine monk of the congregation of Saint-Vannes and one of the most renowned Bible scholars of his day. wherein the good monk provides extensive dissertations on the occult topics of angels, demons, magic, sorcery, witchcraft, and instances of vampires, revenants, and other individuals returning from the grave. Le Fanu borrowed liberally from a portion of that work for a story the Woodman character recounts in Chapter 13, which is probably why The Edinburgh Review casually dismissed this story in 1903, stating: “Carmilla, skilful as it is in treatment, is little more than a re-edited, modernized version of an old and hideous fantasy.”2The Supernatural in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. (1903, April). The Edinburgh Review, 404(197), p. 407. A take that is a little too dismissive in our estimation because Le Fanu was no literary slouch. That Stoker retraced Le Fanu’s vampiric steps for his own Dracula and the fact that all modern vampire lore can trace its lineage directly to Carmilla speaks volumes not so easily dismissed.
Further evidence of Carmilla’s enduring influence within the vast pantheon of vampire fiction can also be traced through a wide variety of mediums: books, comic books, movies, music, radio plays, stage and theater, television, video games—even an opera and a much-beloved web series.
When you look at Carmilla’s persisting legacy today, the mind boggles to think that Le Fanu died penniless and in debt. A tragedy, to be sure.
As for the text, we have updated some hyphened words to reflect their modern usage: to-night is now tonight, good-night has become goodnight, and so on.
We have also appended over 70 footnotes to enhance your reading with definitions of many archaic and literary terms Le Fanu utilized throughout the text, as well as to provide clarity and details for some geographic locations and quoted sources.
Given this story’s subject matter and its setting of Austria, is it too wrong of us to leave you with a hearty Guten appetit?
Contents
Heathenry: Thoughts on the Text
Carmilla
Carmilla
Praise
“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
“The eerie inventions of the author, the dreadful, deliberate, and unsparing calm with which he works them out, make him the master of all who ride the nightmare. Even Edgar Poe, even Jean Richepin, came in but second and third to the author of In a Glass Darkly. His Carmilla is the most frightful of vampires.” —The Daily News
“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
Details
Carmilla
Heathen Edition #38Format: Paperback
Interior: Black & White on Cream Paper
Pages: 128 (+2 POD)
Language: English
Annotations: 78 Footnotes
Illustrations: 4
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