Carmilla

Carmilla is a Gothic novella first published in the magazine The Dark Blue in 1872, and then in Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s collection of short stories, In a Glass Darkly the same year. Carmilla, the title character, is the original prototype for a legion of female and lesbian vampires. Carmilla selects only female victims, becoming emotionally involved with a few. Like Varney, Carmilla was not confined to darkness. She had unearthly beauty, was able to pass through solid walls, and could change into a large black cat (compared to Dracula, who changed into a large dog).

Carmilla had a heavey influence on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In the earliest manuscript of Dracula, the castle is set in Styria, although Stoker changed the setting to Transylvania in a later version. Stoker's posthumously published short story Dracula's Guest, which was removed from Dracula to cut down on the novel’s size, shows a more obvious and intact debt to Carmilla. Both stories are told in the first person. The descriptions of Carmilla and the character of Lucy in Dracula are similar, and have become archetypes for victims and seducers alike in future vampire stories. The investigative character of Stoker's Dr. Abraham Van Helsing is a direct parallel to Le Fanu's vampire expert Baron Vordenburg.