Christopher Gray looks at Dublin's significant in vampire literature

Dublin has a special place in the history of vampire literature, being the birthplace of both Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, and J. Sheridan Le Fanu, whose novella Carmilla, published a quarter of a century earlier in 1872, is recognised as its literary precursor. The story focuses on a lesbian blood-sucker — somewhat daring subject matter, you might think, for Victorian Britain.

This year sees the bicentenary of Le Fanu’s birth, which is being marked in various ways by members of the Dracula Society. The celebration began in January with a showing of The Vampire Lovers, a 1970 film loosely based on Carmilla, which starred Ingrid Pitt and Peter Cushing. A colourful image was conjured in my mind by the society’s website stating: “As a bonus ‘extra’, the evening also included a re-enactment by members of a ‘missing scene’, which was scripted but never used in the final version of the film.”

Like many people, I came to know Le Fanu through his work as a writer of horror stories. The widely anthologised Green Tea, about a clergyman haunted by a phantom monkey, was the first I read as a child. Stacy Aumonier’s Miss Bracegirdle Does Her Duty, of 1916 — concerning a timid woman finding a man asleep in her hotel bed — was another I relished in the same book of hair-raising tales. I was later to meet its writer’s great-grandson, the sculptor Richard Aumonier, when he took part in the biennial on form exhibition in the grounds of Asthall Manor.

In time, I developed an admiration for Le Fanu’s work as a novelist. Many of his books were in the ‘sensational’ style with which his contemporary Wilkie Collins is associated. Perhaps the best-known of these is Uncle Silas. In this early example of a locked room mystery, the sinister Silas seeks to get his hands on his niece’s fortune. It was made into a film in 1947, featuring 18-year-old Jean Simmons.

One of my favourite Le Fanu novels, which I recently reread, is The Rose and the Key (1871). At its centre is another female victim of ‘false imprisonment’. I refer to Maud Vernon, who is incarcerated for no reason — actually, for a very good reason, but not that she is ill — in a mental hospital. Somewhat implausibly, Maud takes an age to discover where she is, believing herself to be a guest at the home of her friend Lady Mardykes long after it becomes apparent to the reader that everyone around her is doolally. “A filmy suspicion was stealing over Maud, too terrific to utter,” we read, after a further bizarre encounter with her fellow guests.

But there is so much to enjoy in the story — deft plotting, convincing characterisation, and a robust and serviceable prose whose directness is in telling contrast with the circumlocutions of other writers of the time.

This is seen, for instance, in Le Fanu’s description of one of the wonders of his age, the departure of a train: “The clapping of the doors was over now, the whistle skirled his horrid blast, the engine communicated its first jerk through all the articulations of the snake-like train, and the carriages were again gliding forward.”

Le Fanu had a sound grasp of psychology and a welcome comic touch. Both are seen in The Rose and the Key when a friend of the heroine is told that a certain young man is not good enough for her: “Miss Tintern met this with a protest, and a torrent of the sort of eulogy with which the enamoured astonish those who still enjoy their senses.”

Anyone who possesses a Kindle can enjoy Le Fanu at no cost as his work is almost all available to download free of charge. In the past few weeks I have read in this way a range of gripping novels, including Guy Deverell, Willing to Die (his last book), The Tenants of Malory and The Evil Guest.

A favourite writer of mine, E.F. Benson, whose books include not only comic novels in Mapp and Lucia vein but excellent ghost stories too, made an admirable statement concerning Le Fanu’s work in this genre. It holds true, I think, for his entire oeuvre: “[The stories] begin quietly enough, the tentacles of terror are applied so softly that the reader hardly notices them until they are sucking the courage from his blood.”

His books were also described succinctly by Henry James: “The ideal reading in a country house for the hours after midnight.” James’s own rambling property of this sort, though in a town rather than the country, was Lamb House in Rye where his chilling story The Turn of the Screw was written in 1897. His successor as tenant was E.F. Benson.

So, having started this article with two vampire writers from Dublin, I end — rather neatly I think — with two ghost writers who shared another place of residence.