A lonely Schloss or castle in the dark Austrian forest is the setting for this marvellous Gothic tale. CARMILLA is the earliest vampire story in fiction literature. One night in the pale moonlight, a horse-drawn carriage crashes near the residence where the narrator, a girl of eighteen, lives with her elderly father and staff. A woman from the carriage asks them to care for her daughter, who has been stunned. She must leave but will return in three months. So Carmilla, a pretty, enticing young miss, comes to stay. While the family knows nothing of her background, she speaks a few languages and is clearly educated. Then a sickness descends on the nearest village.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu was an Irish writer of Gothic tales and mysteries. Carmilla, written in 1872, follows the Irish tradition of short-form storytelling, being novella length. The Central European location follows the dark fairytales of Grimm, in the Black Forest and the Rhine’s mountaintop pointy-crowned castles. We also gain ballets from Central Europe, such as Swan Lake in which a young noble goes hunting and meets a woman enchanted to the form of a swan. People half-believed this could all be true, over there, when society was composed of nobility and peasants, with doctors and clergy poised uneasily between them.

Bram Stoker, another Irishman, was a theatre critic and managed the Garrick Theatre in London. Adapting the vampire story for Dracula, he changed the antagonist to a man, adding a male-female sexual frisson that drew from stage dramas. The Carmilla character is shown to prey on young women, which allows her greater access to victims while seeming to the readership of the day quite outside the permissions of society. With no promising young noblemen in the vicinity, the daughter of the household spends her time with whichever daughter of friends might visit, and this means Carmilla has a greater impact on her quiet life.  

We also get a look at what it meant to be titled and landed, but not wealthy. The small family lives simply in a mausoleum, supporting servants and using very few rooms (for reasons of heat and candles) while the roads are too bad to invite much travel.

I have reviewed an e-book, and I note handsome Gothic lettering at the start of chapters. The physical version of CARMILLA deserves a place on the shelf of any reader of fantasy, Gothic mysteries, lesbian romance and horror. This is a gradually creepy tale which invites re-reading.