Nineteenth-century French vampire fiction is usually marginalized in vampire studies compared to the better-known British vampire works by John William Polidori, James Malcolm Rymer, J. S. Le Fanu, and Bram Stoker. However, French Gothic literature of the time had a stronger vampire tradition than Great Britain, the United States, or other nations’ literatures. What makes French vampire literature particularly unique is its depiction of female vampires.
Female vampires are nonexistent in British literature until J. S. Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1871) unless one counts the enigmatic Geraldine of Coleridge’s unfinished poem “Christabel” (1816); critics still debate whether Coleridge intended Geraldine to be a vampire. French authors, by contrast, embraced the female vampire in their earliest works. The nineteenth-century fascination with vampire fiction began with the publication of Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) in England. After the novella was quickly translated into French, it became more popular in France than in England, inspiring several plays. Cyprien Bérard also wrote a sequel, Lord Ruthwen ou les vampires (1820), which contains the first female vampire in fiction.
In this article, I will review depictions of female vampires in three French novels by Cyprien Bérard, Étienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langon, and Paul Féval. The female vampires in these works are depicted less as bloodsuckers than as the enemies of the vampires who created them. I will also compare these female vampires to their less extreme counterparts in the works of J. S. Le Fanu and Bram Stoker and argue that enough textual similarity exists to suggest those British authors knew the earlier French works.
Cyprien Bérard’s Lord Ruthwen ou les vampires
Because The Vampyre was misattributed as a work by Lord Byron, Pierre-Franҫois Ladvocat would publish Polidori’s story under Byron’s name in France. This attribution to Byron would increase the novel’s popularity. Ladvocat would also publish Cyprien Bérard’s sequel, Lord Ruthwen ou les vampires (1820). Charles Nodier, who worked for Ladvocat and later wrote the play version of Polidori’s story, would provide the introduction to Bérard’s book, causing some misattribution of the story to him.[1]
Bérard and Nodier’s works would cement the popularity of vampire literature in France, where it surpassed vampire literature’s popularity in Great Britain. This popularity may be due to the French equating the vampire figure with an aristocrat who preys on others—a metaphor for how the upper classes had preyed upon the French people prior to the French Revolution. That the vampire was equated with Lord Byron, and thus, with nobility, only strengthened this connection. Furthermore, Lady Caroline Lamb had published in 1816 her novel Glenarvon, which had depicted a fictional version of Lord Byron giving him vampiric characteristics. Lamb wrote her novel as a form of revenge against Lord Byron after he had ended their romantic liaison. Therefore, it is ironic and fitting that the French also used revenge as a major theme in their vampire fiction. Only, this time, the vampires were not humans with vampiric characteristics but true vampires, and their female victims did not write novels as revenge but rather sought to help annihilate the male vampires who had wronged them.
Bérard’s story begins where Polidori’s left off. Lord Ruthven has successfully destroyed his former friend Aubrey’s sister, and now Aubrey seeks revenge upon Ruthven. The novel opens in Venice with the love story of Bettina and Léonti. Lord Ruthwen (Bérard’s spelling for Polidori’s Lord Ruthven) is also in Venice, and there he preys upon Bettina, causing her death. Her lover Léonti then searches for the stranger who destroyed the woman he loves. He meets Aubrey and they share notes until Aubrey is convinced the stranger is the Lord Ruthwen who killed his sister.
Aubrey and Léonti follow a trail of clues to locate Ruthwen. In the process, they hear the story of a Moravian woman who was betrayed by her lover and died. She then returned from the grave and pursued him. This story is believed to contain the first female vampire in French literature, and notably, she became a vampire through her lover’s betrayal, not by being bitten by another vampire.
Aubrey and Léonti then receive confirmation that Bettina has become a vampire (apparently also because of her lover’s betrayal; neither Polidori nor Bérard make Lord Ruthven a blood drinker). Léonti insists that if Bettina is a vampire, she will only use her powers to protect and help him in his quest to destroy Ruthwen. Soon after, Bettina appears and tells the men she rose from the grave as a vampire, but an angel came to protect her in a dream and told her she cannot be reunited with Léonti until Ruthwen is returned to the tomb.
The men now travel to the Duke of Modena’s court where a Lord Seymour (Ruthwen in disguise) has insinuated himself into the duke’s court and become prime minister. When the duke’s palace catches on fire, Seymour saves the duke. For his reward, he asks for the hand of the duke’s daughter, Eleanora. At the wedding, Aubrey and Léonti recognize Seymour as Ruthwen. Bettina also appears and confirms that Seymour is a vampire. She then falls and dies. Léonti plunges a blade into Ruthwen’s breast. Ruthwen dies and is buried, but in the days that follow, many women begin dying, so he is dug up. When life is seen to be still on his lips, he is destroyed by having red-hot irons applied to his heart and eyes.
While Bettina does not destroy Ruthwen, she clearly assists Léonti in destroying Ruthwen. Rather than becoming a vampire like him, Bettina is an innocent victim of the vampire. Consequently, God assists her through the angel he sends to inform her how she can be reunited with Léonti, though only in the afterlife. Consequently, Bettina is the first female vampire who seeks revenge upon her creator.
Literary critic Kevin Dodd states that Bettina is a kind of Virgin Mary to Ruthwen’s Satan and the story is the only Ruthwen narrative in which an “unquestionably good vampire” opposes Ruthwen. “She feeds on no one and is genuinely altruistic.”[2] Stableford, in a similar vein, refers to Bettina as an “anti-vampire,” also stating she is the first of the “seductive female revenants,” who are numerous in French literature.[3]
Étienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langon’s The Virgin Vampire
Étienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langon’s La Vampire, ou la Vierge de Hongrie (1825), translated into English by Brian Stableford as The Virgin Vampire, is the first work to have a female vampire as its main character. Like Bettina, Alinska in The Virgin Vampire is subjected to a fate she did not choose. But Alinska is also more complicated than Bettina. While she becomes an object of terror to the novel’s other characters, once her backstory is revealed, the reader sympathizes with her.
The Virgin Vampire is set in France in the years following the Napoleonic Wars. Edouard Delmont, a colonel in Napoleon’s army, has decided to leave Paris and relocate his family—his wife Hélène, son Eugène, and daughter Juliette—to a chateau near Toulouse. He tells his wife a change in their finances requires them to move, but the truth is he has received a demanding letter from Alinska, whom he formerly promised to marry when he was stationed in Hungary with Napoleon’s army. There they engaged in a blood pact promise, but when the army departed, Edouard decided to forget about Alinska and later married Hélène.
Not long after the Delmonts arrive in Toulouse, Edouard is called away to visit his sister. While Edouard is away, Alinska moves into the neighborhood. Raoul, a former soldier who served under Edouard and is now a servant to the Delmonts, knows of Alinska’s past relationship with Edouard, but no one in the family does. When Raoul tries to confront Alinska about why she is pursuing Edouard, he is manhandled by her powerful servant. Raoul then tries to write to Edouard to warn him of the danger, but his letters are inexplicably torn to pieces or become covered in blood. Eventually, Edouard’s children and then Hélène befriend Alinska. When Alinska’s house burns down and her servant dies in the fire, Hélène invites Alinska to seek shelter under the Delmonts’ roof.
Edouard returns home to find himself in an uncomfortable situation. Alinska confronts him about how he broke his vow to her, but he can do nothing to resolve the situation since he is married to Hélène. Then Edouard and Hélène’s son Eugène becomes ill. Raoul, realizing Alinska is not quite human, looks through a keyhole one night when she is watching over the child and sees her sucking out Eugène’s blood through his mouth. Raoul enters the room and shoots Alinska, but she manages to stab and kill him. When she later claims the house was attacked by thieves, who killed Raoul, the Delmonts believe her. Alinska recovers from her gunshot wound, but Eugène dies.
Soon after, Hélène also begins to weaken. Edouard takes her away from Toulouse, but she feels the need to see Alinska again and calls her to her deathbed. Hélène asks Alinska to take care of her daughter Juliette after her death, which Alinska agrees to. Once Hélène dies, Alinska refuses to attend the funeral. She tells Edouard she cannot. Alinska tries to care for Juliette but finds herself repulsed by the girl, so Edouard sends Juliette off to boarding school.
By this point, neighbors report seeing Hélène and Eugène’s ghosts entering the house. Edouard tries to recompense Alinska for his past wrongs by offering to marry her, but she says she cannot be married by a priest. She finally agrees to a civil ceremony, but following that, Edouard brings her to a chapel where a priest awaits. Alinska now feels she must give in to her destiny. When Edouard removes her glove to put a ring on her finger, her hand is revealed to be that of a skeleton and her corrupted blood pours out of open wounds. The priest orders the demon to make itself known, but it is too late; Alinska has fallen to the floor as a corpse.
The novel’s power does not come through in such a simple summary. We are repeatedly shown Alinska being antisocial, rejecting visitors, fleeing from priests, refusing to go to church, and lamenting her fate or making cryptic statements to the Delmont family about her past and how she cannot partake of happiness. The most dramatic of these statements comes when Alinska tells Edouard she cannot marry him in a church:
Thus, making an effort, she cried: “No, Edouard, no, don’t talk to me about a ceremony to which I once attached all the felicity of my existence. Can I be yours now, when I do not belong to myself? Besides, where are your pretentions taking you? Feeble child of humankind, what union are you proposing? Shall I prostrate myself at the foot of the altar that has rejected me? I’ve already told you—banished from the Lord’s temples by a terrible malediction, I would not dare to cross the redoubtable threshold. You would believe it to be open to us, but I would see an exterminating angel there, which would escape your mortal sight. You love me, you say? Well, give me proof of it, by not importuning me again. I believe in your affection; that must suffice—it is not permissible for you to doubt mine.
Alinska then compares herself to the biblical Cain whose sin of murdering his brother resulted in the mark of Cain upon his forehead:
“Edouard, God marked the forehead of the fratricide Cain with a terrible mark; I bear an equally formidable sign on mine; you cannot see it, but he would perceive it, and then it would be necessary to say adieu to you forever, for there is here, as in Hungary, consecrated ground ever-ready to receive bodies that must dissolve.”
“Poor girl! How I pity you! You’re misled by the prejudices of your education; thus, by virtue of a chimerical dread, you oppose our common happiness. If you fear the rigors of the church, though, would you be equally afraid of a union consecrated by the civil authorities?”
“Oh, that wouldn’t matter—no sacred hand would touch my own.”[4]
Unlike Cain, however, Alinska has not committed a true transgression; rather, she has been transgressed against by her lover, though one might argue the pact she and Edouard made was based in pagan superstition and, therefore, a transgression against God. Edouard had agreed to the pact in Hungary, but the text never reveals what happened to Alinska after Edouard abandoned her. She apparently died and then rose from the grave as a vampire, though how she died is unclear. We may assume it was from a broken heart. Her punishment of becoming a vampire is unfair since she was abandoned by her lover, and she continually fights her vampiric urges while knowing she is cursed by God and will eventually suffer hellfire. As Brian Stableford points out, we cannot feel sympathy for Edouard since he abandoned her, but the novel’s real villain may be God, who creates such unjust punishment. Stableford remarks that Alinska herself is the instrument of God’s Divine Wrath, and:
Within the metaphysical schema of La Vampire, the question tentatively asked and left unanswered by Bérard, as to why God allows evildoing vampires to persecute the innocent, simply does not arise. Here, vampires are not evil, and any persecution that is going on is the work of God….
[Alinska’s] eternal and irrevocable damnation is way over the top by reference to any conceivable scale of justice. If she is a monster, she is not a self-made monster; her monstrousness has been inflicted upon her.[5]
One might also argue, given that the novel was written in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, that the novel represents a discomfort with the conquest of much of Europe by Napoleon. The vampire comes from one of the countries Napoleon subjected, and it seeks revenge upon one of Napoleon’s soldiers by following him home to destroy his family.
If Polidori’s The Vampyre is the father of vampire literature, then we might call The Virgin Vampire the mother of it, for it presents the first fully developed female vampire and is the first to grapple with the question of whether vampires can be redeemed.
Paul Féval’s Vampire City
Paul Féval wrote three vampire works, the best in my opinion being Vampire City (La Ville-Vampire, 1875). While it parodies Gothic literature, it also presents a female vampire who actively exacts revenge upon her creator.
The novel’s main character is none other than Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe, whom Féval refers to as Anna. Anna is, as Brian Stableford has noted, an early version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.[6] Anna leaves England the morning of her wedding after learning from Ned, fiancé to her cousin Cornelia, that Cornelia has been abducted on the continent by a vampire named Monsieur Goetzi.
Anna heads to the continent where she meets Ned at an inn. Ned was attacked by Goetzi and is now lingering near death. Anna also meets Polly, who has partially become a vampire because Goetzi attacked her. Because Polly was Goetzi’s first victim, she has a special connection to him. She says that only she can help kill him, which must be done by inserting a key in his breast at a specific hour when he is weak. (Féval makes up such rules about vampires throughout the novel, obviously going for exaggerated humor.) Anna and her companions begin to pursue Goetzi.
Goetzi eludes the vampire hunters again and again—partly because all of his victims become in a sense part of him. They can even seem to double for him or at least serve his purposes. At one point, Goetzi escapes by crossing water, and he brings all his doubles or companions with him. They all enter inside of him, and then he lays flat on the water and floats on his back, feet forward, to his destination.
This sight results in Polly’s dramatic speech:
While each of them silently considered this strange spectacle, the former Polly broke down in tears. When she was asked why she was so sad, she replied: “Do you think that I can look upon the monster who stole my honor and my happiness without being overcome by rage? Mark this: he will not give you an inch of leeway while you lack the means of destroying him utterly. I tell you this partly for the sake of my vengeance, but above all else for your safety. Every hour of the day and night, whether he be apparent or hidden, you may be certain that Monsieur Goetzi is always prowling around you. Consequently, I now intend to explain in every detail the plan which I have already suggested briefly to Merry Bones—which, if it is executed courageously, will permanently annihilate our common enemy. The moment is favorable, for while we can see him down there, we can be certain that he is not here, listening. While he does not have me, he is obliged to keep all his other parts within him, and you will understand how angry that makes him.”[7]
Polly then tells them they must go to Vampire City where all the vampires reside. She gives them details on how to get into the city and what to expect there. They are successful in their journey, stealthily make it into the city, and they succeed in cutting out Goetzi’s heart.
Polly is remarkable for not only does she want revenge, but she has a psychic or telepathic connection to Goetzi that previous female vampires did not have. This connection allows her to assist in Goetzi’s destruction, thus fulfilling her desire for vengeance.
French Female Vampires’ Influence on Carmilla and Dracula
Of course, the question arises of whether Le Fanu or Stoker read these French novels and were inspired by them when creating their own female vampires. Unfortunately, Le Fanu and Stoker left us no references to these French novels so most critics have shied away from declaring there is an influence. I agree no hard evidence exists, but the textual similarities between the novels in their themes and characterizations, especially when considering the role of female vampires in the novels, makes me think it very likely Le Fanu and especially Stoker had knowledge of the French female vampire tradition.
Le Fanu’s Carmilla is a bloodsucker unlike the French female vampires, but she also seems both to act intentionally and feel remorse for what she plans to do. Consequently, she is most akin to Alinska.
Carmilla’s intentions are clear when she tells her friend and future victim Laura, “You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one for ever.”[8] When Laura questions her about things she keeps secret, Carmilla states:
The time is very near when you shall know everything. You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more ardent the more selfish. How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come with me, loving me,—to death; or else hate me and still come with me, and hating me through death and after.[9]
These statements suggest Carmilla is fully aware that she plans to kill Laura, to drain her of her blood.
In other instances, however, Carmilla seems unaware of her actions or at least unable to explain them. Early in the novella, we are told Laura experienced a strange dream as a child in which she saw a female crawl out from her bed and bite her. The reader is obviously intended to see this as a foreshadowing of Carmilla later being in Laura’s life. When Laura then meets Carmilla, Carmilla remarks that she recognizes Laura from a dream of her own, stating:
I was a child, about six years old, and I awoke from a confused and troubled dream, and found myself in a room, unlike my nursery, wainscoted clumsily in some dark wood, and with cupboards and bedsteads, and chairs, and benches placed about it. The beds were, I thought, all empty, and the room itself without anyone but myself in it; and I, after looking about me for some time, and admiring especially an iron candlestick, with two branches, which I should certainly know again, crept under one of the beds to reach the window; but as I got from under the bed, I heard some one crying; and looking up, while I was still upon my knees, I saw you—most assuredly you—as I see you now; a beautiful young lady, with golden hair and large blue eyes, and lips—your lips—you, as you are here. Your looks won me; I climbed on the bed and put my arms about you, and I think we both fell asleep. I was aroused by a scream; you were sitting up screaming. I was frightened, and slipped down upon the ground, and, it seemed to me, lost consciousness for a moment; and when I came to myself, I was again in my nursery at home. Your face I have never forgotten since. I could not be misled by mere resemblance. You are the lady whom I then saw.[10]
Carmilla turns out, then, to be an odd vampire, for unless she has completely made up the story above, she does not seem to understand fully the vampirism that motivates her actions, and thus, she is reluctant as a vampire, far from the male Dracula who appears to delight in his bloodthirst.
The similarities between French female vampires and the female vampires in Dracula are even stronger. Stoker’s novel has five female vampires in total—the three in Dracula’s castle, Lucy Westenra, and Mina Harker. Mina never fully becomes a vampire, but while the other female vampires are all bloodsuckers, Mina is most akin to French female vampires.
I have argued in my book Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides: The Marriage of French and British Gothic Literature, 1789-1897 that Stoker could read and probably speak French well enough to read French vampire fiction in French.[11] In addition to my arguments there, it is notable that in his Dublin journal, he copied out an inscription in French he saw at a Trappist Monastery in France.[12] If he couldn’t read French, it is doubtful he could have understood the inscription, much less would have copied it. Furthermore, he made several trips to the Continent, at least four in the 1870s.[13]
While Stoker makes no mention of the French vampire novels discussed above in any of his notes for Dracula or other writings, he certainly was familiar with many works of French literature, including the works of Alexandre Dumas. Dumas would write his own vampire play, The Vampire, in 1851. This play has no female vampires, and we do not know if Stoker knew it, but it is very likely he did since he was the manager of the Lyceum Theatre and very familiar with most popular plays of the era. He certainly knew Dion Boucicault, who created his own version of Dumas’ vampire play in 1852. Boucicault wrote several works for Sir Henry Irving, Stoker’s employer, to perform at the Lyceum, as Stoker states in his Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving. Boucicault’s vampire play does not contain female vampires, but his play version of Dumas’ The Corsican Brothers (1852) may have influenced Dracula.[14] Irving’s production of The Corsican Brothers at the Lyceum in 1880 included Stoker in the cast as an extra, the only time Stoker is ever known to have performed.[15] The Corsican Brothers shares a similarity with Dracula because it depicts two brothers who are able to feel each other’s pain and sense when something is wrong with the other. Stoker may have been influenced by this connection between the brothers to depict Mina’s telepathic connection to Dracula after he forces her to suck his blood. It is also similar to the telepathic connection between Polly and Goetzi in Féval’s Vampire City.
Perhaps an even more significant work by Dumas that may have a connection to Dracula is The Hero of the People (1853), part of Dumas’ Marie Antoinette series. In that novel, Gilbert hypnotizes Andrée so he can learn the whereabouts of their son Sebastian. While Andrée does not know where Sebastian is, in the trance, she is able to see things usually beyond human ability, referred to as a “second-sight vision.” While in the trance, Andrée realizes Sebastian has had an accident and been rescued by a “vampire” doctor.[16] Dumas also uses a form of the second sight in The Man in the Iron Mask, in which the musketeer Athos feels so connected to his son Raoul that he senses his death before news arrives to confirm it. Dumas’ use of the second sight might have inspired Féval in creating the connection between Polly and Goetzi, which in turn may have inspired Stoker.
We know Stoker was interested in the second sight and he definitely used it in Dracula. Once Mina has become Dracula’s victim, she becomes the means for defeating him because through a form of the second sight, Mina is able to sense Dracula’s movements and read his thoughts, which she then communicates to the novel’s male vampire hunters so they can pursue and kill him. I feel this use of the second sight can be no coincidence on Stoker’s part. Based on previous British vampire literature, the vampire is destroyed by the use of stakes or other weapons but not with the help of a victim who has gained psychic powers. That means of defeat only exists in French vampire fiction prior to Dracula. Perhaps Stoker developed the idea on his own, but Dumas and Féval could be sources for his idea to use it in Dracula. That said, uses of the second sight are also abundant in British literature and include Edward Bulwer Lytton’s A Strange Story (1862), H. Rider Haggard’s Allan’s Wife (1889), and Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins’ play The Frozen Deep (1856), but we have no record that Stoker knew these works any more than we have record he read Féval, while we do know he was familiar with Dumas’ works, even if only in translation or in plays adapted from them. He might also have been influenced by nonfiction works, of course. He definitely was fascinated with the second sight, again using it in his novel The Mystery of the Sea (1902), even using the actual term, which he does not in Dracula. Later in 1909, he wrote a book review of Norman Macrae’s book Highland Second Sight. Paul S. McAlduff and John Edgar Browning discuss Stoker’s interest in the second sight and list several nonfiction books in Stoker’s library that mentioned the topic, several of which predate the publication of Dracula.[17]
In Stoker’s novel, Mina understands that Dracula’s power over her is so great that while she can read his thoughts, he can also read hers. Therefore, she avoids learning everything the men know from fear she will betray them by unwittingly helping Dracula. Mina and Van Helsing discuss this situation in detail in Chapters 25 and 26 of the novel. This connection and the resulting sympathy Mina feels for Dracula results from the vampire’s hold upon his female victim. Féval is the first author to employ sympathy as a plot device in this manner. Polly even goes so far as to become Goetzi once his actual body is destroyed. Nowhere does a vampire have another character serve as almost a double for him before Vampire City, and nowhere again does it occur until Dracula.
Conclusion
Several other similarities exist between Vampire City and Dracula that I have discussed in Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides, plus other possible French influences upon Dracula, but the strongest argument for a possible influence is the use of female vampires who seek revenge upon their creators and assist in bringing down his downfall, even when, like Mina, they feel conflicted over the matter.
We may never know whether Stoker read Féval or other French authors, and to some extent it does not matter. To say Stoker drew from these works may in some ways limit Stoker’s genius. To say these authors influenced Stoker may also deny their works their own marks of genius if they are read only as sources for Dracula. Tracing such lines of influence may be detrimental to full appreciation of both works. However, authors have always influenced other authors throughout history, so why should we think the case was any different with vampire literature? I believe Stoker was influenced by the French vampire tradition given the similarities presented in this discussion between his and French vampire novels. Furthermore, all of the authors discussed here made significant contributions to vampire literature, especially in their depiction of female vampires, and they deserve to be acknowledged and appreciated for those remarkable contributions.
Bibliography
Belford, Barbara. Bram Stoker and the Man Who Was Dracula. Cambridge, MA: De Capo Press, 2002.
Bérard, Cyprien. The Vampire Lord Ruthwen. Trans. Brian Stableford. Encino, CA: Black Coat Press, 2011. Kindle edition.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Christabel.” 1816. The Portable Coleridge. Ed. I. A. Richards. New York, NY: Viking Press, 1970. 105-27.
D’Arcy, Uriah Derick. “The Black Vampyre, a Legend of St. Domingo.” 1819. Edinburgh, Gr. Brit.: Gothic World Literature Editions, 2020. Kindle edition.
Dodd, Kevin. “Plot Variations in the Nineteenth-Century Story of Lord Ruthven, Pt. 1.” Journal of Vampire Studies. 1.2 (2020): 19-43.
Dumas, Alexandre. The Corsican Brothers. 1844. In Alexandre Dumas: Collection of 34 Classic Works with analysis and historical background (Annotated and Illustrated). n.p.: Annotated Classics, n.d. Kindle edition.
Dumas, Alexandre. The Hero of the People. 1853. Trans. Henry Llewellyn Williams. New York, NY: J. S. Ogilvie Publishing Company, 1892. Kindle edition.
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Dumas, Alexandre. The Vampire. 1851. Trans. Frank J. Morlock. In The Return of Lord Ruthven. Encino, CA: Black Coat Press, 2004. Kindle edition.
Féval, Paul. Vampire City. 1875. Trans. Brian Stableford. Encino, CA: Black Coat Press, 2003. Kindle edition.
Féval, Paul. The Vampire Countess. 1865. Trans. Brian Stableford. Encino, CA: Black Coat Press, 2003. Kindle edition.
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Lamothe-Langon, Étienne-Léon de. The Virgin Vampire. 1825. Trans. Brian Stableford. Encino, CA: Black Coat Press, 2011.
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Polidori, John. The Vampyre. 1819. In The Vampyre and Ernestus Berchtold: or, The Modern Oedipus. 1819. Collected Fiction of John William Polidori. Toronto, Canada: U of Toronto P, 1994. p. 33-49.
Richardson, Elsa. Second Sight in the Nineteenth Century: Prophecy, Imagination and Nationhood. London, Gr. Brit.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Skal, David J. Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker the Man Who Wrote Dracula. New York, NY: Liveright, 2016.
Stableford, Brian. “Afterword: A Brief Note on the Theodicy of La Vampire.” In The Virgin Vampire by Étienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langon. Encino, CA: Black Coat Press, 2011.
Stableford, Brian. “Introduction.” In The Vampire Lord Ruthwen by Cyprien Bérard. Encino, CA: Black Coat Press, 2011. Kindle edition.
Stableford, Brian. “Introduction.” In Vampire City by Paul Féval. Encino, CA: Black Coat Press, 2003. Kindle edition.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula: The Postcolonial Edition. 1897. Ed. Cristina Artenie. Montreal, Canada: Universitas Press, 2016.
Stoker, Bram. The Lost Journal of Bram Stoker: The Dublin Years. Ed. Elizabeth Miller and Dacre Stoker. Austin, TX: HellBound Books, 2012.
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Tichelaar, Tyler R. Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides: The Marriage of French and British Gothic Literature, 1789-1897. Marquette, MI: Marquette Fiction, 2023.
TYLER R. TICHELAAR is an author and independent scholar. He has a PhD in nineteenth-century British literature from Western Michigan University. His publications include two books on Gothic fiction, The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption and Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides: The Marriage of French and British Literature. He blogs at http://www.GothicWanderer.com.
[1] Stableford, “Introduction,” The Vampire Lord Ruthwen.
[2] Dodd, “Plot Variations, Part I,” p. 28.
[3] Stableford, “Introduction,” The Vampire Lord Ruthwen.
[4] Lamothe-Langon, The Virgin Vampire, Chapter 23.
[5] Stableford, “Afterword: A Brief Note on the Theodicy of La Vampire.”
[6] Stableford, “Introduction,” Vampire City.
[7] Féval, Vampire City, Chapter 10.
[8] Le Fanu, Chapter 4.
[9] Le Fanu, Chapter 6.
[10] Le Fanu, Chapter 3.
[11] Tichelaar p. 422-3.
[12] Stoker, The Lost Journal, p. 241.
[13] Stoker, The Lost Journal, p. 238.
[14] Belford p. 130.
[15] Skal p. 219; Stoker, Personal Reminiscences, Chapter 15.
[16] Dumas, The Hero of the People, Chapter 15.
[17] McAlduff and Browning, p. 88. For more on the nineteenth-century fascination with the second sight, see Elsa Richardson’s Second Sight in the Nineteenth Century. Richardson discusses expeditions into Scotland to find people who had the gift, as well as how it was used in literature by authors like Andrew Lang and Dickens and Collins in their play The Frozen Deep (1856). However, Richardson makes no mention of Stoker.
The Gothic Wanderer 