Blood Sisters_ Vampire Stories by Women - Paula Guran Page 0,1

into the same public vein.

As for the vamps—before Stoker (and possibly before le Fanu), there were vampire stories written by women as well as men. Some are lost due to pseudonyms and intentional anonymity, but known examples include:

• Eliza Lynn Linton’s “The Fate of Madame Cabanel,” published in 1880. It portrays provincials who label a stranger among them—the innocent Fanny Cabanel—as a vampire due to their superstition, bigotry, and ignorance (of, among many other things, proper drainage and sanitation).

• “Let Loose” (1890) by Mary Chomondeley is an odd, but effective, story of a man who wears high collars looking for a crypt in which there is a fresco painted by his father. Deaths coincide with his appearance and scars on his neck do not match those of the dog he claims bit him.

• “Good Lady Ducayne,” published in 1896 by Mary Elizabeth Braddon is a “scientific” variant on the legend of Elizabeth Báthory, a Hungarian countess who allegedly killed hundreds of girls between 1585 and 1610 to obtain their virginal blood believing she would retain her youth if she bathed in the vital fluid. In Braddon’s novella, the wealthy aristocratic Lady Ducayne’s sinister doctor, Parravicini, performs “experimental surgery” on girls in her employ to obtain blood he then injects into her ladyship to prolong her already long life.

• In “A Mystery of the Campagna” (1886) by Anne Crawford (Baroness von Rabe) the bloodless corpse of the narrator’s friend is found after being seen with a lovely woman. A sarcophagus is found in an ancient vault in which the remarkably healthy-looking occupant is the same woman. Helpfully, among the Latin inscriptions naming her as Vespertilia, is one in Greek that translates as “The blood-drinker, the vampire woman.” A wooden stake to the heart is inevitably employed.

Stoker also acknowledged an 1885 essay by Emily Gerard on “Transylvanian Superstitions”—later part of her 1888 book The Land Beyond the Forest—as important to his research. He “borrowed” some elements: the term nosferatu and information about a “Devil’s school, the Scholomance, where the members of the Dracula family learned the secrets of the ‘Evil One.’”

[Note: The claim that “The Skeleton Count, or The Vampire Mistress,” allegedly written by Elizabeth Caroline Grey and published in 1825 or 1828—thus supposedly making it the first known published story by a woman—has been, at best, debunked as unproven and, at worst, a complete hoax.]

Having acknowledged some of the influence eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women had on Bram Stoker, we must now admit that the Dracula-type vampire popularized by the novel, as well as stage productions and films that followed, heavily dominated authors’ and readers’ minds for many years.

Fantasy, the “weird,” and science fiction in the first half of the twentieth century was primarily written in the short form, so the vampire appeared in stories rather than novels. In those days genre writing of that type was produced predominately by men. But women managed to be published, and a few wrote vampiric prose.

One of the most notable vampiric works by a woman in the early twentieth century is the ambiguous but eerie “Luella Miller” (1902) by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. Freeman’s character was a type of “psychic vampire,” a schoolteacher who seemingly draws the life out of anyone close to her. No one, including Luella, is really sure this deadly effect is either intentional or evil.

Whether C. L. (Catherine Lucille) Moore’s “Shambleau” (1933) is a vampire story may be open to question, but one can make a good argument that the alien Shambleau is a form of vampire. At first assumed by the hero to be an attractive human women unjustly victimized by a Martian mob, she turns out to be a creature who sucks the life-force out of others with her wormlike “hair” while placing her victims in an addictive ecstatic state.

Various vampiric attributes and powers were added or subtracted in films and short stories produced during the first five decades of the last century. The vampire thrived in those two media, but no notable vampire novels were published until 1954 when Richard Matheson contributed the idea of vampirism as an infectious disease with apocalyptic consequence in his novel I Am Legend.

By the 1960s, short form vampirism was also mixed with other science fiction tropes such as being an inherited genetic condition. Vampires were even rendered in a sympathetic light—as long as it was acknowledged they were, by nature, evil and chose (as humans could) to resist their monstrosity and to be “good.”

Evelyn E. Smith’s vampire, Mr. Varri, in “Softly While