Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu – Carmilla

Before there was Count Dracula, there was Carmilla. Indeed, it was Sheridan Le Fanu who introduced the vampire into the English literature tradition. Carmilla was first presented to the world in serial form, published in four editions of a magazine called The Dark Blue between 1871 and 1872. The four sections were then presented as a full-length novella in a collection alongside other tales from Le Fanu published under the title In a Glass Darkly. Carmilla was the final entry in that collection which predated the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula by a quarter of a century.Carmilla may have been inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Cristabel” (1797), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), and Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819).