Disclaimer: This is a review, and as such will contain opinions, spoilers and (often) general shit talking. (If you talk about what you don’t like about a work, you learn a lot. When you think through a work with the stakes presented to you by the creator, by the context of the work, you learn a lot. I review things, not because I love to dislike things, but because dislike contains rich and vital information for the process of experiencing something, but I cannot access it without interrogating it.) So, if you don’t want to have this thing spoiled for you, or don’t know how to behave when a person on the internet, that you don’t know, has opinions that don’t line up with yours, this review is not for you. It’s also not for the author/creator of the work. Please and thank you.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu, an Irish gothic author, published Carmilla in 1872, a year before he died. 25 years after Carmilla was published, Bram Stoker, another Irish gothic author, wrote Dracula, which heavily borrowed from Carmilla.
The story of Carmilla takes place in an isolated castle deep in the Austrian forest. Laura leads a solitary life, with only her father and their staff for company, until one moonlit night a horse-drawn carriage crashes into view.
The beautiful and enchanting Carmilla becomes a guest of Laura and her father, beginning a feverish friendship between Laura and Carmilla.
Carmilla is the antithesis to Dracula.
Le Fanu’s novella is female-centric, ambiguous and enigmatic — and boldly sapphic — where Stoker’s story is, yes, longer and more fleshed out, but also male-centric and heterosexual.
Carmilla is a beautiful, sensuous stranger who is readily welcomed into the family as a treasured guest and friend, rather than the withered and evil other of Count Dracula, who is feared and reviled as a monster (first as a monstrous man and later a fully realised monster).
Carmilla has a very different basis for its horror. Where Dracula draws more from Vlad the Impaler’s history and mythology, the threat in Carmilla is much more personal.
Dr Hesselius lays out the principle that a vampire can feed in two ways; one way is the straight up feeding on a victim for sustenance, and the other way is when the vampire first seduces her victim and infuses both the victim and herself with a passion that gives her something much more than mere sustenance to the feeding.
And it’s this latter type of feeding we get to witness as Laura and Carmilla grow ever closer, their friendship turning unapologetically sapphic early on.
Towards the end then, there is also the question of what this kind of feeding really means as the vampire ultimately ends up destroying a loved one (not just an enemy or stranger), what parts of herself does she kill in the process?
If we compare the novella to the 1992 film adaptation, the similarities between Carmilla and Lucy (rather than leading lady Mina) are striking; the sapphic undertones of Lucy’s relationship with Mina mirror the relationship of Carmilla and Laura, and the scene where Van Helsing leads the raid on Lucy’s tomb in order to put and end to Lucy is incredibly similar to the scene where Dr Hesselius leads a raid on Carmilla’s tomb.
Carmilla is eerie and beguiling in a way that Dracula is only in passing. The horror feels much more personal, on the skin, as you’re guided into this exploration of destruction – of the self, of the other, of a loved one as it echoes the fundamental aspects of what it takes to sustain life.
Carmilla lacks the xenophobia and Christian fear mongering, but it’s still Victorian.
Dracula is essentially the story of an Eastern man coming to corrupt the souls of British men, infecting their womenfolk with his savage bloodlust. In the 1992 film adaptation Van Helsing has that monologue about how civilisation and “syphilisation” have evolved hand-in-hand that echoes Victorian values and concerns.
And if we look at this from a Victorian perspective, in an age before antibiotics, contracting an STD had devastating consequences.
In the prudish Victorian imagination, syphilis was synonymous with the other great “social evil” of prostitution, which represented physical and moral decay.
Though neither man names the disease, the subtext is clear: Ernest contracted syphilis during a wild night in Paris – a misfortune that could befall anyone, really. The doctor offers no rebuke. Instead, he shifts blame by lamenting that “the women who carry this disease” are often asymptomatic. As a wealthy, male patient, Ernest is afforded more sympathy than the poor, working-class women who turn to prostitution to make ends meet.
—Why last night’s VD-laced episode of Victoria should worry modern audiences, The Guardian
Victorian purity culture emphasised sex as a part of marriage, and stigmatised any kind of promiscuity.
All of that is deeply present in Dracula, which warns of succumbing to temptation.
Although, in the 1992 film adaptation (perhaps, in true Hollywood fashion) the focus is more on fighting sexual temptation and disloyalty – the theme showcased in several layers: Mina’s disloyalty with Dracula, Jonathan’s disloyalty with the three women in Dracula’s castle, the sapphic undertones of Mina’s relationship with Lucy, as well as in how Lucy plays all three of her suitors against each other, never settling on being “faithful” to any one of them.
Carmilla’s message is more a warning about obsession and demonising lesbianism. Carmilla is portrayed as this all-consuming personality who’s only goal is to completely consume you, and balances on this swordpoint of her being seductive in a way that is ultimately detrimental to whoever is unfortunate enough to catch her attention.
This seems to be as much a warning to women about having affection for other women as it feels like a secret male fantasy being expressed in fiction.
Victorian attitudes normalised heterosexuality while labelling non-conforming behaviours as deviant.
Victorian England’s attitude toward lesbians was shaped by a combination of social invisibility, legal ambiguity, and moral anxiety.
Unlike male homosexuality, which was explicitly criminalised under laws like the Labouchere Amendment (1885), female same-sex relationships were not legally recognised as a crime. This was largely due to Queen Victoria’s supposed disbelief that lesbianism existed — while this is likely more myth than fact, it reflects the broader societal refusal to acknowledge female same-sex desire.
Victorian society was deeply patriarchal, and women’s sexuality was generally viewed through the lens of their relationships with men. Since sex was often defined in terms of penetrative acts, female same-sex relationships did not fit neatly into legal or medical frameworks.
While male homosexual acts were prosecuted, lesbianism was largely ignored by lawmakers, which led to a paradox: lesbians were not legally persecuted in the same way as gay men, but their existence was also denied or rendered invisible.
Victorian women often formed intense, emotionally charged relationships known as “romantic friendships”. These relationships, involving deep affection, letter-writing, and even cohabitation, were generally accepted, as long as they were framed within the ideals of emotional closeness and moral purity.
However, when such relationships were suspected of being sexual, they could be viewed as unnatural or even pathological.
By the late 19th century, the rise of sexology and psychology introduced new ways of thinking about sexuality. Doctors and moralists began pathologising same-sex attraction, framing it as a form of mental illness or “sexual inversion”.
Philosopher and psychologist William James theorised that while the repulsion of homosexuality is instinctive, cultures in which homosexuality is regularly practised and (as he saw it) tolerated, could only have been achieved by overcoming the “natural” aversion through force of habit — implying that tolerance was learned, revulsion was inborn.
Another philosopher and sociologist, Edward Westermarck, came to a similar conlcusion in his 1908 cross-cultural study. He extended his theories to address the rejection of homosexuality by religious institutions, linking homophobic attitudes with Christianm, Jewish, and Zoroastrian religions to the historical association of homosexual practices with idolatry and heresy. (Yikes!)
Anyway, that duality of intense attraction towards Carmilla while at the same time having a feeling of unease and repulsion is present in a lot of the character descriptions, such as “with gloating eyes she drew me to her” and “she would whisper almost in sobs you are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one forever” and “you must come with me, loving me to death or else, hate me and still come with me, and hating me through death”.
In the end, Carmilla is an empty vessel yearning to be filled. She is, by her nature, incapable of truly loving someone as she is always destined to destroy them.
That suicide to vampire pipeline is total BS btw.
So, at the end of the book we learn what turns a human into a vampire, and it gets… weird.
“How does it begin and how does it multiply itself? I will tell you. A person more or less wicked puts an end to himself. A suicide under certain circumstances becomes a vampire. That spectre visits living people in their slumbers, they die and, almost invariably, in the grave develop into vampires.”
Le Fanu attributes suicide as an originator of vampirisim, which is just fucked up, also alluding that only those who took their own lives can spawn more vampires. And add to this the definition that the “disease” of vampirism passes from one person to the next as a kind of infection, which overtakes the victims (mostly or exclusively women in Carmilla, I think?) with a kind of feverish passion. Read between the lines on that one.
This is more of that Victorian/Christian purity culture coming through, saying that only wicked people — those who were wicked in life and so wicked, that they even ended their own life, which was a sin against God as a life doesn’t belong to the person, but to their creator — are punished in such a way, stripped of all humanity in the afterlife.
And even though Carmilla is perhaps a gentler window into a Victorian imagination, it still strongly advocates that ‘otherness’ — whether it’s a supernatural creature, “odd” behaviours (cultural differences) or the colour of your skin — is scary and should be feared, reviled and suspected.
But this isn’t unique to either book, this is simply a glimpse into the attitudes and thoughts of Victorian society, which is openly and vividly present in most books of the time.
So, even with all its narrow-minded attitudes about a relationship between two women, this is a kind of underhyped Gothic gem. If you like Dracula, I think it’s definitely worth a read, just so long as you remember, it shows its age. (Tbf so does Dracula.)
At the very least, it’s an interesting read when you find out just how much Dracula leaned on Carmilla, resulting in that age-old tale of a man (Dracula) gaining more success for being/doing the same thing as a woman (Carmilla).
I will note that Anne Rice has cited Carmilla as a major influence for her Vampire Chronicles (in case you feel like reading atmospheric vampire lit by a woman), and there have been comic and film adaptations of Carmilla, so it’s always fun when you know the origin story.
Want to get more out of reading books?
Grab this FREE guide on how to start a reading journal, complete with review templates, reading trackers and bingo sheets.
Understand yourself better as a reader, engage more with the books you read & make space for creative self-expression. Get it now!
“When Sasha Barrett gets bitten by a snake on a mission, her squad captain’s quick actions not only save her life, but also make her realise something she may have known all along…“
