Sheridan Le Fanu's gothic spirit lives on

The Guardian ^ | 8/28/2014

[Borges]

The latest Google doodle – a wispy, fanged blonde girl-head floating over a sleeping dark-haired woman – commemorates the 200th birthday of the Irish novelist Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-73). The image honours his most famous story, Carmilla, first published in 1871 in a magazine called The Dark Blue, then incorporated a year later into the important collection In a Glass Darkly.

The novella is notable for tackling a vampire theme decades before Le Fanu's countryman Bram Stoker wrote Dracula (which contains several deliberate echoes of Carmilla) and presenting an eroticised view of predatory female friendship which earns it a place on the list of early (if veiled) depictions of same-sex relationships in literature.

[Borges]

I missed the bicentennial yesterday.

[WXRGina]

I've read Carmilla a couple of times. It's THE classic vampire story, every bit as much as Stoker's later Dracula, and the weird "affection" the vampire has for her "girlfriend" victim just adds to the creepy, evil of the story.

[WXRGina]

PS: I'm a big fan of Victorian-era ghost stories. Marvin Kaye has several compilations of ghost and other creepy and horror stories--old and new ones. One of them has Carmilla in it: Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural. Another good one is, Masterpieces of Terror and the Unknown.