Writen in 1872, more than twenty years before Bram Stocker's Dracula, Le Fanu's masterpiece is one of the first vampire stories. And Carmilla is the first female vampire in British literature.
Born in Ireland, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu was a politician and a man of letters. "The invisible prince", as he was nick-named, would often ask bookshops for "a lovely little ghost story". Whereas his own were much admired by Henry James.

"For some nights I slept profoundly; but still every morning I felt the same lassitude, and a languor weighed upon me all day. I felt myself a changed girl. A strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy that I would not have interrupted. Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that I was slowly sinking took gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome, possession of me. If it was sad, the tone of mind which this induced was also sweet. Whatever it might be my soul acquiesced in it."