Writing The Female Vampire at Elizabeth Gaskell’s House online

Head online for a spine-tingling talk beaming out of Elizabeth Gaskell’s House, where the team is inviting you to step over to the dark side (just for an hour, don’t fret!) to look at literary vampires, particularly the role of female vampires in a “blood-curdling selection of familiar classics and new favourites”.

First stop in this spellbinding Halloween talk – and to mark his bicentenary year (he died on 19 April 1824) – you’ll delve into Lord Byron’s unfinished novel The Burial: A Fragment. This supernatural horror story was the first in English to feature a female vampire and was written in 1819, not long, as it happens, after he spent the summer at Lake Geneva with Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife Mary, famously the author of the Gothic novel Frankenstein.

Next up, another early work of vampire fiction, Carmilla by Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu – this Gothic novella of 1872 introduces the iconic lesbian vampire and predates fellow Irish author Bram Stoker’s Dracula by 25 years. Stoker’s classic of 1897 is of course visited in the talk, as is Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s 1896 novella Good Lady Ducayne, in which – shudder! – the titular character secretly drinks the blood of her young companions. Finally, the talk turns to Elizabeth Gaskell herself, and her love of the Victorian Gothic – could her short piece Poor Clare be considered a vampire story?

Guiding you through all this is the very knowledgeable Dr Diane Duffy, who holds a PhD in early nineteenth-century women’s writing, is the Chair of the Gaskell Society and who has sat on the Board of Elizabeth Gaskell’s House since November 2021.