The Vampyre and Carmilla

The first vampire short story and novella, which came before Dracula, together in one Penguin Classics hardcover, a Penguin Speculative Fiction Special, with a foreword by #1 New York Times-bestselling author V. E. Schwab

A Penguin Classic Hardcover

The first vampire short story in English, The Vampyre by John Polidori, and the first vampire novella, Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, are published together in one volume. The Vampyre, first published in 1819, features Lord Ruthven, a deathly pale yet fatally charismatic nobleman who preys on women of high society and is generally considered as the first fully developed vampire narrative in English literature. It is here accompanied by Alaric Watts’s introduction, with which it was published throughout the nineteenth century, and which contains important supplementary material on vampire beliefs. Carmilla (1871-2) by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu is a nineteenth-century Gothic novella featuring a protagonist who typifies the long line of female and lesbian vampires in literature, movies, television series, and artwork. In a castle deep in the Austrian forest, Laura, a young woman, leads an isolated life with her father. A horse-drawn carriage crashes and an unexpected guest, the mysterious and seductive Carmilla, enters their lives. An early, sophisticated, and influential vampire novel, Carmilla predates Bram Stoker’s Dracula by twenty-five years and the film Nosferatu by fifty.

Penguin Speculative Fiction Special is a hardcover series of horror, science fiction, fantasy, and more published by Penguin Classics. Featuring custom endpapers, specially commissioned cover art, and introductions by scholars and notable figures, these collectible editions celebrate classics that invite us to ask, ＂What if?＂ and that, through bold imagination, alternative visions, and magical realms, transform our perception of our world.

John Polidori (1795-1821) was born in London to an Italian immigrant father and English mother. He studied medicine at Edinburgh University, graduated at the age of just nineteen, and in 1816 became physician to Lord Byron. He accompanied Byron on a tour through Europe, famously spending the summer at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland where they regularly met with the poet Percy Shelley, his partner Mary Godwin (later Shelley), and her half-sister Claire Clairmont. It was here that Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein was inspired, influenced in part by Polidori’s conversation and behavior--as recorded in Polidori’s diary. Although Polidori’s fractious relationship with Byron led them to part ways, they remained on cordial terms until the publication of Polidori’s tale ’The Vampyre’ in 1819, which was willfully misattributed to Byron by the publisher Henry Colburn. Polidori was attempting to realize his literary ambitions by publishing ’The Vampyre’, extracts from his diary, a volume of drama and poetry, and a novel begun at Diodati (Ernestus Berchthold; or, The Modern OEdipus). However, the controversy surrounding ’The Vampyre’ sank his writing career and he published little else. He died by his own hand in 1821.

Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873) was born in Dublin to staunch Protestant parents descended from French Huguenots. He studied law at Trinity College Dublin, and while he maintained a somewhat desultory legal practice after graduating, his chief energies were directed towards fiction and journalism. He published his first novel, the historical adventure The Cock and the Anchor, in 1845, and edited a number of newspapers during his lifetime--notably the Dublin University Magazine, in which he serialized his own stories and, despite his Irish nationalist tory sympathies, took a relaxed editorial line. He found his distinctive authorial voice in mysteries and thrillers such as The House by the Church-Yard (1861-3), Wylder’s Hand (1863-4), and Uncle Silas (1864), and in his collections of uncanny and supernatural tales--most famously In a Glass Darkly (1872)--which are often haunted by Irish politics and history. Known as ’The Invisible Prince’ in Dublin due to his solitary and nocturnal lifestyle, Le Fanu died a recluse in 1873.