Carmilla, Explained: The Lesbian Vampire Novel That Came Before Dracula

Before Laura says a word, you are told she is dead.

The novella opens with a prologue from an unnamed editor sorting through the papers of Doctor Martin Hesselius, an occult physician. He mentions that he tried to write to the woman who sent in this particular account, wanting more detail. It did not work out: "Much to my regret, however, I found that she had died in the interval."

Then the narrative starts, and a nineteen-year-old girl begins cheerfully describing her father's castle in Styria and the eight or nine hundred a year that goes a long way there. You already know how this ends for her. Le Fanu published Carmilla in 1871–72, serialised in The Dark Blue and then collected in In a Glass Darkly, and he was dead himself within a year of the book appearing.

What actually happens

Laura lives with her widowed English father in an isolated schloss in Styria, in what is now southern Austria. She is lonely to an extent the book takes seriously — the nearest inhabited village is seven miles off.

A carriage overturns near the castle gates. A woman travelling in urgent secrecy asks the family to shelter her daughter for three months, refuses to explain anything, and leaves. The girl is called Carmilla. Laura recognises her instantly: at six years old she woke in the nursery to find a young woman in her bed, was comforted by her, then felt a sharp pain at her breast and screamed the house down. Carmilla, it turns out, has the matching dream from the same night.

They become close very fast. Carmilla comes down at one o'clock, takes a cup of chocolate, and eats nothing. She will not say where she is from — her mother, she explains, has placed limitations on her. When a funeral passes on the road and Laura joins in the hymn the mourners are singing, Carmilla shakes her, roughly, and demands: "Don't you perceive how discordant that is?"

Meanwhile peasant girls in the surrounding villages start dying of a wasting illness, and Laura begins having dreams about something at the foot of her bed.

How explicit is it, really

More than people expect from 1872. The question usually gets asked as though the lesbian content were coded, and some of it is. A lot of it is not.

Here is Laura, describing what she calls Carmilla's "strange paroxysms":

It was like the ardor of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet over-powering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips traveled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, "You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one for ever."

That is not subtext. Le Fanu gives Carmilla a small amount of cover — she tells Laura that in her country this is simply how friends behave — but Laura does not believe it, and the narration does not either.

What gets lost in the modern reading is the second half of Laura's sentence. Hateful and yet over-powering. Laura is nineteen, isolated, and being fed on. She is attracted and she is frightened, and the book refuses to resolve which is which. Treating Carmilla as a straightforwardly romantic text requires skipping the parts where Laura is plainly not consenting to something, and treating it as pure homophobic panic requires skipping the parts where she is drawn in. It holds both, uncomfortably, which is most of why it is still read.

The Dracula question, honestly

The claim you will see everywhere is that Stoker lifted Carmilla wholesale. The evidence is real but smaller than the claim.

Dracula came out in 1897, twenty-five years after In a Glass Darkly. Stoker's working notes, held at the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia, show the story originally set in Styria — Le Fanu's setting — before it moved east to Transylvania. And "Dracula's Guest," published by Florence Stoker in 1914 after her husband's death, is set on Walpurgis Night outside Munich and turns on the tomb of a Countess Dolingen of Gratz, in Styria. She presented it as a deleted opening chapter.

That last part is where it gets murky. Scholars have argued for decades about whether "Dracula's Guest" was ever actually a chapter of Dracula or a separate piece Florence reframed to sell a collection. There is no manuscript page settling it.

So: Stoker read Le Fanu, started in Le Fanu's Styria, and moved on. That is worth saying. "Dracula is a rewrite of Carmilla" is not.

The name is the clue, and nobody catches it

Carmilla's deception is an anagram, and it is disclosed in the text by Baron Vordenburg near the end. The original is Mircalla, Countess Karnstein. Every alias she uses has to be built from exactly those letters — "without the omission or addition of a single letter."

Carmilla does this. So does Millarca, the name she gives while destroying General Spielsdorf's ward Bertha. Vordenburg treats this as a constraint the creature cannot break: whatever else it can do, it cannot fully abandon its own name.

It is a better detail than it first appears, because it means the General had the answer in front of him the whole time and so did Laura's father, who is shown a portrait of Mircalla Karnstein — dated 1698, freshly cleaned, hanging in his own house — and remarks on how much it looks like Carmilla. He says it is a pretty likeness and moves on.

The ending, and who actually saw it

The Imperial Commission opens the tomb at Karnstein. The body is found in seven inches of blood, apparently breathing. A sharp stake is driven through the heart, and the thing shrieks "in all respects such as might escape from a living person in the last agony." The head is struck off, body and head burned, the ashes thrown in the river.

Laura did not see any of it. She says so directly: her father kept a copy of the Commission's signed report, and "it is from this official paper that I have summarized my account of this last shocking scene."

The most violent passage in the book is a nineteenth-century girl paraphrasing a bureaucratic document, and it is easy to read straight past that. Le Fanu puts the novella's one moment of certainty — official, signed, witnessed, filed — at exactly the distance where Laura cannot vouch for it.

Because the last paragraph is not certainty at all. Years later, Laura writes that Carmilla comes back to her in "ambiguous alternations" — sometimes the languid, beautiful girl, sometimes the writhing thing in the ruined church — and that she still startles out of reverie thinking she has heard a light step at the drawing room door.

Then the prologue's editor tells you she died before he could ask her anything more.

Read it

Carmilla runs about 27,000 words. Most people finish it in one sitting, and the sixteen short chapters were written for serial publication, so it moves.

• Carmilla — complete, sixteen chapters plus the prologue, free.
• The Well of Loneliness — Radclyffe Hall, 1928. What happened when a novel dropped the supernatural cover and said it plainly. Britain banned it inside a year.
• Regiment of Women — Clemence Dane, 1917. A boarding-school novel about a magnetic woman who consumes the people who love her, with no vampire at all and considerably less comfort.