Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu was first published in 1872. Carmilla is a vampire story and predates Stoker’s Dracula by 25 years. I expected a story that would be outrageous and colored with the supernatural, melodramatic and worthy of an eye roll or two. What I got was something else entirely.
In case you don’t know it, the plot centers around Laura, a girl of 18. She lives with her widowed father in a remote castle in Styria in the middle of a forest. The closest neighbors are a few miles away. Laura’s only real company are her two governesses. One evening while the three of them and Laura’s father were out looking at a particularly bright moon, a carriage comes careening around the bend and flips over. Everyone inside is more or less fine, except Carmilla, a girl of Laura’s age, who is shaken and a bit in shock. The girl’s mother is in a panic as she is in a hurry to get somewhere and can’t waste time waiting for her daughter to recover. Laura’s father insists that they leave the girl with them even though the mother says she will not be able to return for her for three months. But after more insisting, Carmilla is left in the care of complete strangers. The mother mentions that the girl has a delicate constitution and has just recovered from a long illness and is forbidden to talk about who she is and where her family is from.
Carmilla recovers soon enough and she and Laura become close friends. It also turns out that when they were each six, they had had a dream in which the other one had appeared as her older self. When Laura had her dream as a child she awoke screaming because she had been bitten on the chest but no marks were found and no one thought anything of it.
Carmilla is pale and tends to sleep late. She doesn’t leave her room until after 1 in the afternoon. Soon reports of girls mysteriously dying in the area filter in to the castle. And when paintings that had been sent out for restoration are delivered, one of them painted in 1698 of Mircalla, Countess of Karnstein looks exactly like Carmilla. Carmilla manages to pass off the resemblance by admitting that she is a descendent of the Countess. Right.
The book is really well written and compelling even though there were a few moments I wondered how Laura and her father could be so blind to what was going on. What surprised me most though was the sex. Where Dracula is a somewhat sexy novel, it doesn’t hold a candle to Carmilla:
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.”
Steamy! And there are plenty of other passages like that one.
Carmilla’s victims are always girls while Stoker makes Dracula clearly heterosexual and sets him up as a danger to the proper containment of female sexuality. Le Fanu does not condemn either Carmilla or Laura’s sexuality. Instead, sex is a way to lull Laura’s anxiety and lure her to accepting death. I must say though that as often as Laura finds herself attracted to Carmilla, she feels as though she is in a trance and is sometimes disgusted with herself and hates Carmilla. I’m sure there is lots of psycho-sexual analysis that can be done with this story, but I’ll leave it there. A tease.
If you have read Dracula but not Carmilla you really need to read it. And if you haven’t read either, do read Carmilla, it’s better than Dracula, at least I think so.
My first RIP IV book! Next RIP post will be about Castle Otranto by Horace Walpole.
I love Carmila and the work of Sheridan Le Fanu-I recently read and posted on one of his most famous ghost stories “Green Tea”. I really like his quite scary story set in Ireland in the time of troubles “The Child Stolen by Fairies”. I was so happy when saw how much you liked him also. It did seem very odd Carmila parents would leave her in the care of total strangers. I really like the prose style of Le Fanu. I enjoyed your post a lot and agree he is a better writer than Bram Sroker, no slouch himself
I’m excited to read your thoughts on the Walpole! Saw your tweets on it & laughed.
And now I’m intrigued because you & Richard (Caravana de recuerdos) had such different takes on Carmilla. I guess I’ll have to check it out myself to see which side of the fence I come down on. Oh, the sacrifices I make for literature, reading about 19th-century lesbian vampire sex all in the service of becoming well-read.
I read Dracula back in the day (before a trip to Romania, just for kicks) and wasn’t particularly entertained by the vampire aspects. I mean, vampires just aren’t my thing (though Dracula still managed to amuse the heck out of me). But if I ever have a go at another vampire book, this would probably be it. One of the things I disliked about Dracula was the clumsy writing – it might be a comfort to read Carmilla if, as you say, the quality of writing is much better. I’ll keep this in mind.
Woah what a tease! I’d been thinking about reading this one and now I may just have to. What an intriguing review!
Mel U, I’ve been meaning to read Le Fanu for ages and I am so glad to have finally been able to! I was pleasantly surpirsed. I have taken noted of the stories you mention and will track them down for my Kindle. He has a marvelously clear and modern writing style that I liked quite a lot. Leaving your daughter with strangers is suspicious but it appears to be her modu operandi, a ploy which good hearted people with young daughters seem to fall for.
Emily, I didn’t know anything about the story other than it was a vampire story so I was suprised by what was in it. I also found the writing enjoyable, not plodding at all and lacking in much of the baggage that Stoker drags into Dracula. I think you will find the story especially interesting for your disgust project since Laura asserts, several times, that she feels disgust towards Carmilla while at the same time being drawn to her and fascinated by her. Would love to know what you make of it!
Bibliobio, I found the writing in Darcula to be rather clumsy too. Le Fanu has a cleaner, clearer style that feels more modern in some ways. It is also interesting that vampires have been all about sexuality from the beginning and what the intertwining of sex and death days about the human psyche would be a fascinating topic to explore.
Litlove, heh, given the novel a tease seemed appropriate
I would be really interested to hear what you made of this story. I found its portrayal of female sexuality interesting escpeially in comparison with Dracula. Where Mina in Dracula is ashamed for having given in to the Count, Laura is at first distrubed but then finds she likes the way she feels and keeps it a secret from her father even though she knows she is probably dying.
I have never heard of this before. It sounds interesting. Great review!
I downloaded Carmilla to my Kindle a couple of months ago. The only thing I’ve read by Le Fanu is Uncle Silas, which was very very good (and quite scary). I didn’t want to know too much about Carmilla before I’ve read it, so I just skimmed this post, but will get back to it after I finish the book – hopefully I’ll get to start it over the weekend. And after reading your earlier post, I checked our library to see if Kindle books were available yet, and they were! Only thing is I had trouble downloading the program to my desk top computer at work for transfer to the Kindle. Probably has something to do with our network at the office. Safeguards and all that. I’l have to try it on my personal computer at home. Right now, there isn’t a great selection of titles, but I imagine that will change.
Written the same year as Middlemarch and Princess and the Goblin. Interesting. I think I’m going to have read Carmella and then reread the other two.
You have completely sold me! I am going to keep my eye out for this one. I think it’s interesting that a lot of books (well, maybe not *lot*) from the 1800s treat women’s attraction to each other as almost normal. Not that it’s *not* normal, but it strikes me as interesting that it was almost a way for women to have sexual feelings without having to go through the troublesome man thing. Of course it is usually manifested in being “bosom friends” and “sisters”, but still.
Anyway. I’m totally seeking out Carmilla.
I read Dracula unabridged sometime in high school, and even as I liked it, the book gave me the creeps. I knew the story from before though, since I had read an abridged graphic novel version of the story as a kid. The Lucy Westenra in my mind still looks exactly like in that story. Scary.
I should check out Carmilla.
Very interesting! I have read Dracula but not this one, so I guess I’d better get at it!
It sounds like a lot of fun, and I’m intrigued that you think it’s better than Dracula. That would make it worth while checking out for sure.
Kailana, thanks! It is one of the earlier vampire stories and a great influence on Bram Stoker.
Grad, makign a note of Uncle Silas for next year’s RIP reading! Hope you enjoy Carmilla when you get to it. It’s more racy than scary. And cool that you have Kindle books at your library. A coworker with a Kindle informed my the other day that my library has them now too just within the last week. Yay!
Carrie, it is hard to imagine it being written the same year as Middlemarch. If you read it I will be very interested to hear what you make of it.
Daphne, you will like this one for sure. As for women’s attraction back then, I had a women’s lit class in college and we talked about how relations between women weren’t really frowned on because it was sex with men that counted and besides, what could two women do with each other? The fellows back then were obviously lacking in imagination
Polaris, I used to love to watch black & white Dracula movies but didn’t actually read the novel until last year. It’s a good one, that’s for sure. I can’t help liking Carmilla just a little bit more though.
Rebecca, I liked it better than Dracula because the prose trips along so much faster and there aren’t all those moralizing, weeping men pledging themselves to the salvation of Mina. Carmilla is straight up gothic with a little lesbian sex thrown in.
I think I more or less missed out on the subtext in Dracula–I should read the annotated version sometime. I guess I’ll need to add this one to my list as well. Is this a stupid question…they must know….did her parents know she was a vampire?
Although I didn’t enjoy the writing as much as you, Stefanie, I’m glad you mentioned the mutual dream that Carmilla and the narrator shared as children (which I wish Le Fanu had returned to) and the fact that the novella doesn’t judge the sexuality of the two main characters. Aside from that, though, I still think this one gets way more hype than it deserves!
Danielle, I read the Norton Critical edition of Dracula and it was excellent with some fascinating essays in the back. You would like Carmilla. I am not certain that the woman claiming to be Carmilla’s mother really was, and it is clear from some other things that happen in the story that she definitely knows who Carmilla is and I wouldn’t be surprised if she was a vampire herself.
Richard, that dream, if it was a dream (and I don’t trust that it was or what Carmilla says about it) was odd, wasn’t it? I agree it would have been good if Le Fanu returned to it. He could have used it to make the novel more sinister, Carmilla more evil. But maybe he was having too much fun with all the sex to strengthen that part of the story. Or maybe it is our modern sensibilities of what consistutes horror imposing expectations? Anyway, I thought it was fun and even if it does get more hype than it deserves, I think it makes a nice counterpoint to Dracula and is, of course, necessary for anyone wanting to following the literary history of vampires.