Other editions of book Carmilla: By Joseph Sheridan le Fanu - Illustrated

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla is an old Gothic classic that tells the story of Laura, a young lady who lives with her father in a large castle. Despite living in a castle, Laura is lonely and made lonelier when her father tells her that a girl her same age who was supposed to come visit has mysteriously died. Luckily, a young girl named Carmilla stays with Laura and her father after she has a carriage accident nearby. Carmilla's mother, who was also in the carriage accident, asks Laura's father if she can leave her daughter at the castle for a few months because she must continue on her journey. Carmilla and Laura become the best of friends, and Laura finally finds happiness despite Carmilla's strange habits of refusing to pray, sleepwalking, and sleeping most of the day away. Meanwhile, young women in the area begin dying mysteriously, and Laura starts to have horrible nightmares and eventually she becomes ill. Unanimously, Laura and her father decide to leave the castle, and they soon discover that Carmilla is actually Countess Karnstein, a famous vampire thought to have been defeated many years ago. Baron Vordenburg, a vampire expert, sets off to find the hidden resting place of Countess Karnstein while Laura and her father only hope that he can destroy the monster before Laura is preyed upon once again by "Carmilla". This thrilling story is one of the earliest vampire books written, and it sets the stage for an entire genre of exciting Gothic novels.

Carmilla is a Gothic novella by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and one of the early works of vampire fiction, predating Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) by 26 years. First published as a serial in The Dark Blue (1871–72), the story is narrated by a young woman preyed upon by a female vampire named Carmilla, later revealed to be Mircalla, Countess Karnstein (Carmilla is an anagram of Mircalla). The story is often anthologized and has been adapted many times in film and other media.

Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873) was an Irish writer of Gothic tales and mystery novels. He was the leading ghost-story writer of the 19th century and was central to the development of the genre in the Victorian era. Carmilla is Le Fanu's famous classic vampire story which has been filmed numerous times, including Vampyre (1932), Blood and Roses (1960), Crypt of Horror (1964), The Vampire Lovers (1970) and Carmilla (1999). It tells the story of a strange and mysterious guest who arrives unexpectedly to stay at a castle and takes a great liking to the daughter of the house. Her attraction soon takes on a sinister aspect...and the similarity to the experience of a neighbouring family, whose girl died recently in mysterious circumstances, becomes increasingly alarming....

Award-winning narrator Alison Larkin gives thrilling voice to the elements of lesbian attraction and forbidden and dangerous desires in the story of Carmilla, the Gothic female vampire tale that inspired its more famous masculine counterpart Dracula. "This double billing of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, the vampire story that inspired Stoker, is piercingly wonderful. Bookended by haunting music, the tales share gripping plots, first-person narrators, requisite settings in mountainous middle Europe, and some people with sharp teeth. They also have fantastic narrators. In Carmilla, Alison Larkin’s crystalline tone transmutes as needed from young English girl to old European man, and her pacing transforms the old-fashioned sentences into easy listening while maintaining tension. Clive Hayward’s performance of the tightly plotted Dracula is a tour de force of clear narration, ratcheting-up anxiety, and astonishing characterizations of everyone from English country gal to the Vlad himself. Do not miss the postproduction chat between Larkin and Hayward, which adds to the production’s many pleasures.” (Audiofile)