The story that has shaped vampire fiction for two centuries and is one of the earliest works of queer fiction in the English language
In 1872, an Irish writer named Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu published a novella about a young Englishwoman living in an isolated castle in the forests of Styria, Austria, and the beautiful, languid stranger who comes to stay with her. The stranger's name is Carmilla. She sleeps late, avoids mirrors, never attends prayers, and locks her bedroom door against the night. She tells Laura she loves her. She tells her she will die for her.
Twenty-five years before Dracula, Carmilla helped shape the vampire modern readers now recognize: aristocratic, seductive, psychologically complex, and genuinely terrifying. Bram Stoker read it. So did M.R. James, Anne Rice, and Stephen King. The novel's setting moved from Styria to Transylvania, the vampire's gender shifted from female to male, but the blueprint — the isolated household, the slow predation disguised as devotion, the horror that arrives wearing the face of a friend — was Le Fanu's.
Carmilla is also among the earliest works of queer fiction in the English language. The desire between the two women is not coded or hidden. It is the engine of the story. Le Fanu renders it with a complexity readers have never stopped responding to.
This Ovid Publishing Group annotated edition includes an editor's introduction placing Le Fanu in his literary and historical context, chapter-by-chapter analysis, historical notes explaining the period detail, and a full discussion of the novel's extraordinary afterlife in film, television, games, and literature.
Carmilla predates Dracula, and in many ways, surpasses it.
