Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

Two vampire stories, two authors, two striking meditations on dependency and desire. For readers of Octavia E. Butler, Tananarive Due, and Gwendolyn Christie, comes Caramelle, Jewelle Gomez's latest addition to the universe of The Gilda Stories. This short story offers a supernatural alternate history where vampires seek love, laughter, and blood in 1860s slavery America. Inspired by a glimpse of...

Mysterious and Horrific Stories is a collection of Gothic tales by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Although he is more widely known today for his novella Carmilla (1872), which influenced Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) and remains an important work of early vampire fiction, Le Fanu was also an influential figure in mid-nineteenth century Irish literature as a writer and editor for...

Sheridan Le Fanu was born at No. 45 Lower Dominick Street, Dublin, into a literary family of Huguenot origins. Both his grandmother Alicia Sheridan Le Fanu and his great-uncle Richard Brinsley Sheridan were playwrights. His niece Rhoda Broughton would become a very successful novelist. Within a year of his birth, his family moved to the Royal Hibernian Military School in...

Carmilla (1872) is a novella by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Published twenty-six years before Bram Stoker's Dracula, Le Fanu's work of Gothic horror and mystery is considered an important early entry in the genre of vampire fiction. Recorded in the casebook of Dr. Hesselius, a medical professional with a detective's sensibility, is the story of Laura, a teenager bearing a...

To this hour the image of Carmilla returns to my memory with ambiguous alternations—sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend I saw in the ruined church. Sometimes, I start from a reverie, certain I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing-room door. Isolated in a remote mansion in a central European forest, Laura longs for...

Carmilla is an 1872 Gothic novella by Irish author Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and one of the early works of vampire fiction, predating Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) by 26 years. First published as a serial in The Dark Blue (1871-72), the story is narrated by a young woman preyed upon by a female vampire named Carmilla, later revealed to be...