Carmilla
Twenty-six years before Bram Stoker borrowed the template, Sheridan Le Fanu wrote the vampire story that everything else copies from. Carmilla, serialized in 1871 and collected in In a Glass Darkly the following year, is narrated by Laura, the lonely English daughter of a retired widower living in an isolated Austrian castle. After a nighttime carriage accident, Laura's father takes in a beautiful young guest, Carmilla, and Laura begins to suffer mysterious dreams and a slow physical decline. Le Fanu's novella runs on a barely sublimated current of female desire that gives the book its power, predates Dracula by a quarter century, and almost certainly shaped Stoker's structure, his nocturnal predator, his folkloric undead lore, his investigators piecing together a single hidden grave. The unlikely root of an entire genre.
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What you might want to know about Carmilla
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
In a remote Styrian castle, lonely young Laura is delighted when a beautiful guest named Carmilla is left in her family's care after a carriage accident. Their friendship deepens, along with Laura's strange illness.
Yes. Carmilla was published in 1872, 25 years before Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1897. Sheridan Le Fanu's vampire novella is widely credited as a major influence on Stoker.
Yes. Carmilla was published in 1872 and is in the public domain. Free editions are available legally through Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks, and similar archives.
Carmilla was written by Sheridan Le Fanu, published in 1871 by Fab.
Carmilla is 90 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Carmilla takes most readers 1 to 2 hours to finish.
Carmilla is a standalone novel by Sheridan Le Fanu, not part of a series.
Carmilla is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
