Geary, the increasing popularity of vampires (and of other supernatural creatures and events) from the mid–nineteenth century on can be read as signaling Victorian uncertainty in the face of a more scientific, less religious, and therefore less mysterious world: Beyond its significance purely as a sensational or entertaining figure in literature, the vampire fed a variety of metaphorical hungers in the wider Victorian literary imagination. It is, of course, as a vampire tale that Carmilla originally provoked such pointed interest. This introduction traces the major movements of that critical history.

The story’s potential as a political and/or cultural metaphor, its psychological resonances, its representations of gender and sexuality, and its unusual aesthetic and narrative characteristics, to name only a few areas of interest, repeatedly invite literary criticism, forcing scholars to return to this short, complex work again and again.

Of course, the story’s very nature as a vampire tale alone generates interest, accounting for its frequent inclusion as an early example of the form in British fiction, ³ but Carmilla has proven to have far more to offer than merely its vampiric credentials. Yet Carmilla has nonetheless remained on the critical radar, repeatedly drawing attention and analysis.

This is because Le Fanu himself is often dismissed as a comparatively minor writer or pigeon-holed as a representative of the sensational/gothic subgenres, or because Stoker’s later text purportedly better exemplifies what one typically seeks in a vampire tale.² ¹ Despite its acknowledged influence on the later text and its recognition as the first really successful vampire story, Carmilla is sometimes discounted as a minor work (Geary 1999, 19). Introduction Meet Carmilla KATHLEEN COSTELLO-SULLIVANįirst serialized in the journal The Dark Blue and published shortly thereafter in the short story collection In a Glass Darkly, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 vampire tale is in many ways the overlooked older sister of Bram Stoker’s later and more acclaimed work Dracula.

Carmilla by joseph sheridan le fanu