Hello my Lovely Dreadfuls,
October has arrived, and as the air grows colder and the nights darker, I thought it would be the perfect time to introduce you all to my favorite vampire, Countess Mircalla Von Karnstein...or, Carmilla.
Carmilla came into this world in the late 1800s, penned by a gentleman named Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, an Irish writer born in 1814 who had a particular flair for the macabre. Though Le Fanu passed fairly early, dying at 58 years old, he was a prolific writer, penning gothic horror stories, ghost stories, mysteries, and was a significant influence on the gothic genre as it developed during the Victorian period.
While Carmilla wasn't published as part of the Penny Dreadful canon of the time, it was serialized. From 1871 to 1872, Carmilla was published piece by piece in The Dark Blue, a literary magazine started by an Oxford undergraduate named John Christian Freund in London in 1871. The Dark Blue unfortunately didn't last very long, only running until 1873, but it made an impact on the literary world in London at the time, as it printed essays, poems, illustrations and stories from the likes of Ford Madox Brown (a painter, some of whose works are in the collection of the Tate Gallery) and A.C. Swinburne (a poet and writer who caused quite a stir with his book Poems and Ballads, as some of the poems paid homage to Sappho of Lesbos herself) among many others.
This has caused some confusion as to Carmilla's true publication date it seems, as I have found various claims that range from 1871 to 1873 across several compilations and academic papers. I personally consider 1872 to be the true publication date, as that is the year the story was concluded in The Dark Blue, as well as published as a whole in Le Fanu's collection of short stories In A Glass Darkly.
So, what is it about Carmilla that has captivated us so? What is it about this little known vampire that has endured, lurking in the shadows of literature for the last 150 years? We may not always know her name, but we know her legacy. A legacy that is, in no small part, responsible for Bram Stoker's Dracula.
Carmilla is a story of intrigue, of desire, forbidden temptation and, dare I say, love. Carmilla is a deeply homoerotic story, which some might find surprising for the time, but in reality, homoeroticism and queer-flavored romance is a deeply common thread throughout gothic horror and the legacy of vampires as a whole. Carmilla is considered a cautionary tale of female sexuality, a bucking of the male-dominated social structures of the time and the consequences that incurs, but it's not so simple. It's not simple at all.
So, why have I chosen Carmilla?
I know there are a couple of other literary Substacks out there who are in the process of, or plan on publishing Carmilla at some point. This isn't exactly a novel idea, but it is a sentimental one.
In 2014, Kinda TV (then VerveGirl) launched The Carmilla Series, a feminist and wildly queer modern retelling of the novella. I was at a point in my life where I was just starting to figure myself out, and Carmilla became this positive beacon, this safe space. It made me start writing again, it led me to some of the most wonderful people in my life, and in the long run, it has set me on the course for what will hopefully become a career in the study of queer literature, gothic literature, the study of vampires in literature and history, and how all of those facets intersect and interact.
In short, this is a love letter to the story that changed my life.
I (finally) recently read through Carmilla in it's entirety, and I must say that I was taken off guard by the genuine chills it gave me, the shivers down my spine as I moved through the story, the sweetness and the teeth and sharp edges and dark corners.
The way this story will be formatted is a little bit different than some other Substacks who are also publishing Carmilla. Seeing as Carmilla is only sixteen chapters long, I've decided to break up the chapters into smaller, bite-sized blocks of text (at natural stopping points, of course) so that this story will last long enough for us to truly savor. Each chapter will be broken into a handful of parts, and one part will be published every Tuesday and Thursday in honor of the broadcasting schedule of the web series.
So, shall we meet the Countess?
— The Archivist
Excited!!