Carmilla

Throughout its fictional existence, the vampire’s life has served as a metaphor for human alienation and loneliness, and no literary bloodsucker has been more solitary or empathetic than Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla—the protagonist of the novel first published in 1872. The story introduces Laura, a young woman leading a dreadfully dull life at her father’s mansion in the Austrian woods, and Carmilla, the vampire who falls in love with her: “If your beloved heart is wounded, my wild heart bleeds with it,” Carmilla tells Laura in one of her impassioned outbursts.