Before Dracula, there was Carmilla. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Gothic vampire story was first serialised in The Dark Blue in 1871–72 and collected in In a Glass Darkly in 1872 — 25 years before Bram Stoker published Dracula.
And Carmilla is not simply an interesting footnote on the road to Count Dracula. The story centres on Laura and the mysterious young woman who enters her isolated home, bringing intimacy, attraction, illness and fear with her. That relationship has made Carmilla especially important to later discussions of queer Gothic literature and the female vampire.
What is Carmilla about?
Laura lives with her father in an isolated castle in Styria when a carriage accident brings the beautiful Carmilla into their home. The two young women form an intense attachment, but Carmilla’s arrival coincides with disturbing dreams, illness and deaths in the surrounding area.
It is recognisably vampire fiction, but it does not feel like a rehearsal for Dracula. The threat is intimate. Carmilla is welcomed into Laura’s home and her affection is tangled up with the danger she represents.
Carmilla came before Dracula
Le Fanu’s story predates Bram Stoker’s Dracula by 25 years. That makes it a useful stop for anyone interested in how the literary vampire developed before the Count became the genre’s dominant figure.
If you want to follow that history forward, continue with Clarissa’s Corner’s Bram Stoker: Father of Dracula coverage, then see how the novel keeps changing on stage in Dracula at Bridge House Theatre and the wider Dark Matters Gothic theatre season.
Why Carmilla matters to queer Gothic history
The attraction between Laura and Carmilla is central to the story, which is why the novella has remained important in discussions of same-sex desire in Gothic literature. Reading a nineteenth-century text through a modern identity label needs some care, but the erotic and romantic charge between the two women is not something later readers simply invented.
That also helps explain why the female vampire has become such a rich figure for later feminist and queer reinterpretation: desire, danger, autonomy, repression and otherness can all occupy the same character.
From Carmilla to the modern female vampire
The female vampire did not stop with Le Fanu. Writers and adapters have repeatedly returned to the idea, sometimes leaning into horror and seduction and sometimes reclaiming the figure through feminist or queer perspectives.
That history is also the subject of Dr Sarah Gamble’s History of the Female Vampire talk in the 2026 Seed Talks Gothic double bill. For current dates and booking details, check Seed Talks’ official London listings. We’re also preparing a fuller guide to the Gothic double bill.
Read Carmilla
Carmilla is in the public domain and is available free through Project Gutenberg. Modern print and annotated editions are also available, but you do not need to buy a copy simply to discover the original story.
Read Carmilla free at Project Gutenberg →
Keep going down the Gothic rabbit hole
For current talks and literary events, start with Gothic & Horror Book Events. For darker events more broadly, browse Horror Events. And if the thing you love most is watching old stories mutate into something new, From Covers to Curtains is where the adaptation trail continues.
