The Gothic novel Carmilla features a vampire: the mysterious young woman named Carmilla. Written by Irish author Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, the novella follows Laura, a young woman living in an isolated castle in Styria who becomes fascinated—and endangered—by her alluring visitor.
Carmilla was first published as a serial in 1871–1872 and appeared in book form in 1872, twenty-five years before Bram Stoker's Dracula. Carmilla feeds on young women while presenting herself as charming, intimate, and vulnerable. Her attraction to Laura gives the story an unusually charged emotional tension for Victorian supernatural fiction.
The novella helped establish many conventions later associated with vampires: nocturnal visits, mysterious illness, blood-drinking, a coffin, and the discovery of a monster's hidden identity. Carmilla can also transform into an animal, including a large black cat.
Readers sometimes confuse the story with Dracula because both involve aristocratic vampires and Gothic settings. But Carmilla is earlier, centers a female vampire, and is especially notable for its themes of forbidden desire and female intimacy.