JANE CRANSTOUN

JANE CRANSTOUN, COUNTESS PURGSTALL:

A POSSIBLE INSPIRATION FOR LE FANU’S “CARMILLA”

Matthew Gibson

University of Central Lancashire

(ISSN 1932-9598)

There are several rather obvious sources for J.S. Le Fanu's only story to be set in the Balkans. While we do not have lists of works consulted, as we do with Bram Stoker's Dracula, nor a still extant and catalogued author's library, as with W.B. Yeats, there are nevertheless resonances with other works which make it inconceivable that he either did not consult them, or articles based upon them. One such source is Dom Augustin Calmet's Treatise on Vampires and Revenants, translated into English in 1850 as The Phantom World.[1] Robert Tracy, in his notes to In a Glass Darkly, shows how the story of the Moravian enticing the vampire up Karnstein church steeple before beheading him, is taken wholesale from one of Calmet's accounts (Le Fanu, p. 346). Another obvious source, mentioned although not developed by Jean Marigny,[2] is William Sabine Baring-Gould's The Book of Were-wolves (1863). This work drew attention to Wagener's earlier researches into Erszebet Bathory, the Hungarian Countess who killed her female servants in order to rejuvenate herself with their blood, but who, in Wagener's account, clearly drew pleasure from inflicting sadistic sexual humiliation on her victims, 'especially if they were of her own sex'.[3] The newly current story of Countess Bathory therefore helps to explain why Le Fanu's vampire is a lesbian as well as a Hungarian Countess. The influence of 'Christabel', the first ever lesbian succubae poem in the English language, with its similar theme of hospitality betrayed, has also been suggested by many as a source, especially since the heroine, in both works, is motherless.[4]

That Le Fanu should have written a lesbian vampire story with a Hungarian as his main protagonist, who preys upon a poor orphan girl, is hardly surprising given the prevalence and popularity of the works above-mentioned during his own life-time. What is perhaps more surprising is that he should have set it in Styria, a sparsely populated Austrian province which bordered Hungary, rather than in Hungary itself. As I recently argued in my book Dracula and the Eastern Question,[5] an obvious reason for this is that Le Fanu had a hidden political motive concerning both nations, suggested by the fact that the events of the story correspond to events in Austro-Hungarian history. Carmilla's last portrait, as 'Mircalla', was in 1698, just before her family disappeared in ‘some civil war (Le Fanu, p. 273). This is one year before the Ottoman Emperor ceded most of Hungary to the Austrian Emperor at the Treaty of Karlowicz,[6] and before the Hungarians' own wars under Ferenc Rokoczy II against the Austrians, which ended in 1711.[7] Carmilla's body is exhumed and decapitated one hundred and fifty years after her original burial (Le Fanu, p. 315), as a response to her recent mischief in the region. Although it is left unstated in the story, the date would correspond to around 1848-9, the time of the Hungarian uprising under Kossuth against Austrian rule, and its eventual suppression by the Russians (Gibson, p. 49). The story itself first appeared in The Dark Blue, from December 1871- March 1872,[8] a few years after the Austrian Ausgleich of 1867, in which the Emperor Franz-Josef gave wide-ranging concessions to the disgruntled Hungarians. With respect to these temporal correspondences, 'Carmilla' can be read as a surreptitious, and reactionary warning against too liberal a hand in the Austrian Empire with regard to the 1867 Ausgleich, given the memory of the Hungarian uprising in 1848 which Carmilla's bloody re-emergence symbolises. For the story itself this necessitates a geographical proximity in setting to Hungary, which in turn facilitates an oblique allusion to the former border tussles between two rival nations and two rival aristocracies.

However, Styria was not the only province to border Hungary - Carniola and Carinthia, to name just two, both did as well - and Le Fanu's depiction of the area indicates a very clear understanding of what it was like at the time, with its ruined castles, gigantic forests and general atmosphere of isolated decay. Furthermore, he uses names that betray a knowledge of its region (like 'Baron Vordenburg', for example: Vordernberg was in fact the Styrian residence of the Archduke John, the region's most illustrious citizen). Thus it would appear that Le Fanu must either have known about the region from friends' descriptions, or else have read some of the few travelogues or guides of Styria which were available to him in his own time.

There were several such books, although none in Trinity College Dublin Library (neither Calmet's nor Baring-Gould's works were actually available there either). J. Kohl's Austria (1843) describes mainly the town of Gratz, the Archduke John's ease with people, and Styria's mining resources,[9] while Charles Colville Frankland's Travels to and from Constantinople (1829) mentions Gratz and Styria in passing.[10] Alfred New's The History of Austria from the Earliest Ages to the Present Time (1859) makes only slight references to a few historical events in the region,[11] and Peter Evan Turnbull mentions castle Vordernberg and its ironworks in Austria (1850), again only in passing.[12] None of these books would appear to have exerted much influence on Le Fanu's tale.

As was argued in Dracula and the Eastern Question, the work most likely to have provided Le Fanu with a relevant description of Styria, together with other influential details, is Captain Basil Hall's Schloss Hainfeld; or a Winter in Lower Styria (London and Edinburgh, 1836), a romanticized memoir of Hall's stay, with his wife and young children, at the abode of Countess Purgstall during the winter of 1833-4. However, while it was made clear in Dracula and the Eastern Question that the Duchess’s name, the anti-Turkish and anti-Hungarian elements of Le Fanu’s narrative were all probably suggested by Hall’s travelogue, a further consideration of the full extent of Le Fanu’s borrowings, and what this adds to our knowledge of the tale itself, is still very much needed, since those borrowings, or transformations, are extremely rich. The following argument puts the case for its influence on Le Fanu by considering which elements of that work have emerged in Le Fanu's story, and what light this evidence sheds on Le Fanu's own further intentions in 'Carmilla'. There is a further consideration of the Gothic elements of Hall’s own work, and their importance to Le Fanu’s narrative.

Basil Hall and his family are staying in Naples when the Polish Countess Rzewuska informs them that she has been asked to pass on an invitation from Countess Purgstall of Styria. The Countess wants the Halls to come and stay with her in her Schloss Hainfeld, south of Gratz, owing to the fact that she had been a friend of his father, Sir James Hall, during her youth in Edinburgh.[13]

The countess turns out to be a most eccentric old lady. Since her husband's death in 1811 - a result of imprisonment during the Napoleonic wars - she has not changed anything in the castle (which she no longer owns, due to his dying intestate), and even stays in the bed where her own son died (pp. 36-8). She is now so ill as to be constantly bedridden, but is still intelligent, knowledgeable, and generally very good company for the Halls, with a 'wonderful cheerfulness' (p. 40). The Halls stay at the Schloss during some six months, while also making journeys to the ruined Schlosses of Riegersburg (still part of the Purgstall estate), Gleichenberg and Steinberg, as well as to Vordernberg, the Upper Styrian abode of Archduke John, a cousin of the Emperor Ferdinand (p. 100). Details such as the story of the count who locked his beautiful wife in an iron mask (pp. 66-7) and the poor Italian woman betrothed by her parents to the wrong man (p. 88) flesh out the narrative; in fact, the book is strewn with other stories which the Halls hear from the Countess's lips, all of which have a tinge of fantasy and Romance worthy of a Gothic novel. The Halls stay until the Countess's death on March 23rd 1834, and even arrange her burial, before returning to England.

The ‘wasted’ (p.31) Countess Purgstall’s maiden name probably inspired Le Fanu. Recounting some of the lady's history early on in the book, Basil Hall informs us: 'Miss Jane Anne Cranstoun was born in Scotland about the year 1760, of a noble family, both by the mother's and father's side,'´(Hall, p. 35). Carmilla's family name of Karnstein is probably a coded reference to the maiden name of Countess Purgstall, Cranstoun, whose teutonic basis makes the use of a German language name (suffix -stein) an easier conversion than to a Hungarian name.[14] Le Fanu was possibly simply combining the German name for a neighbouring Austrian province, Karnton (Carinthia) with Countess Purgstall’s maiden name. Such a hybridization of a real Scottish name with an invented German ‘middle European’ sounding name finds its corollary in Le Fanu’s artful word game between two middle European languages. When Carmilla is left at Laura's Schloss by the older woman who has identified Carmilla as her daughter, she calls out first for 'mamma', and then calls again: 'Where am I? What is this place?' ... 'I don't see the carriage; and Matska, where is she?' (Le Fanu, p. 253). This could either be a turn on the Polish word, matka, meaning ‘mother’ or, indeed, the Hungarian word ‘matka’, meaning ‘betrothed’. Le Fanu’s skill in embedding his stories with wordplay is here also used to imply the sexual ambivalence a vampire story in which two women, posing as mother and daughter, are implicitly Lesbian lovers. However, in the allusion to ‘Cranstoun’ through its Germanicised form ‘Karnstein’, the wordplay is a hybridization between a real human being and a fictional character, the former’s reality perhaps forming an important aspect in understanding the goals of the text. Thus by keeping Hall’s ’s travelogue in close comparison to Le Fanu’s text we can see both the source for ‘Carmilla’, but also, through intertextual comparison between this source and its fictional conversion, a further means of judging Le Fanu’s goals.

The reasons why Le Fanu should have been inspired by Countess Purgstall, nee Cranstoun, and even have alluded to her, become obvious as one reads the rest of the work: indeed, many of the details of the Countess's life suggest elements akin to that of a vampire.

To begin with, like Carmilla, Countess Purgstall has difficulties getting up. During the day she is confined to bed due to her long illness:

I should have mentioned that at the time we first saw the countess she was confined to bed three whole years - to the very bed on which her son had expired seventeen years before; and from which, as she said with too much appearance of truth, she herself could never hope to rise again.(p. 39)

Like the vampire, Countess Purgstall has the difficulty of potentially profaning a tomb with her remains once she is dead. When Basil Hall asks her how, as a Protestant, she can hope to be buried alongside her Catholic husband and son in the family vault at Riegersberg, she shows him the coffin which she means to conceal her body from the earth:

I confess I was not a little curious to discover how either strength or beauty could be given to a leaden coffin; I found, however, it was not made of lead but of iron, and so tastefully contrived, that it looked more like one of those ornamental pieces of sculpture which surmounts some of the old monuments of Westminster Abbey, than a coffin intended for real use. (p. 60)

This macabre spectacle of an iron coffin, which will keep Protestant bones from touching Catholic consecrated ground, is itself reminiscent of the problems of vampire burial, in which the vampire’s corpse cannot touch hallowed ground – although in this case the precaution is a result of altruism rather than self-preservation.[15]

The Countess bears another odd similarity to Carmilla herself. Both have little faith in the medical profession. Carmilla professes, when responding to Laura's assertion that the doctor can cure the 'oupire', that ' "Doctors never did me any good."' (Le Fanu p. 270), and then recounts the sufferings of her own past illnesses. The bedridden Countess, we are told, had 'an unconquerable aversion to all medicines', and 'treated all medical skill with proportionate scorn.' (Hall p. 186)

Another major reason why Hall's account of Countess Purgstall can be argued as having influenced Le Fanu is altogether more literary. The last chapter deals with the curious story of how the Countess, a friend of Sir Walter Scott in her youth, had fired his imagination with an account of Gottfried Buerger's ballad 'Leonora', and had been the first person to whom, in 1793, he had read his own translation of the same ballad. She had further arranged for the work to be published as a surprise for him, through the agency of her friend Sir William Erskine. While this was Scott's first ever publication (pp. 331-3),[16] 'Leonora' was itself one of the first German Gothic ballads to gain prominence in Britain, inspiring works like Wordsworth's 'The Thorn'. Arguably, it is thanks to this association that the heroine of Le Fanu’s own book is called Laura, in a corruption of the name Leonora, who is similarly led towards death by a demonic lover (although Laura in fact escapes death). Hall further declares, in the final chapter of his memoir, that he believes Sir Walter Scott to have based the character of Die Vernon in Rob Roy upon Countess Purgstall, despite the lady's protestations to the opposite (p. 341). It is again arguable, that in his own work Le Fanu was inspired to perform a similar sort of real life allusion, in the form of Countess Carmilla Karnstein, perhaps because of his own earlier attempts to write Irish historical novels modeled on Scott's work.

However, Carmilla's character is not the same as that of the Countess: indeed, Laura and Carmilla seem to constitute a division of the Countess's character into two parts rather than a singular allusion. Laura is, like Countess Purgstall, a British woman who now lives like an aristocrat in Styria (although Countess Purgstall enjoys a title as well as the lifestyle, and also comes from a noble family originally); she is also, like the Countess, lonely, in need of company (Le Fanu p. 246), and generous to those, like Carmilla, whom she loves, (the captain frequently mentions the way the Countess indulges his young son [pp.137; 302]).

On the other hand, Carmilla has a similar surname to the Countess's maiden name. Like the Countess, Carmilla is physically weak, but lively in mind, with 'a bodily languour in which her mind did not sympathise. She was always an animated talker and very intelligent.' (Le Fanu, p. 265). Like the Countess, Carmilla spends much of the day in bed, uses her health as a weapon, and is capable of duplicity. Countess Purgstall even sends the family on an excursion with motives which, as Captain Hall later reflects, are probably dubious:

...I now verily believe that the good lady's real object - though probably unavowed even to herself - was to induce us, by any means, to spin out the time till the winter should arrive, and fairly block us up in her castle for the season. (Hall, p. 111)

Whereas Countess Purgstall is a capricious host, Carmilla is a capricious guest, but the effect of delay is the same in both cases. If Mladen Dolar's argument that Carmilla - a distant relative of Laura - is the uncanny (the familiar repressed) contains truth,[17] or even if Victor Sage's mirror theory is correct - that Carmilla is the dream reflection of Laura,[18] - it may be because Le Fanu has seen the potential of two different psyches in the eccentric and ambivalent Jane Anne Cranstoun, in what was a coded homage to one of the pioneering publishers of the Gothic in Britain.

Other details of Schloss Hainfeld support the theory that Le Fanu had read it. The portrayal of a Hungarian aristocrat as wild and predatory in 'Carmilla' coheres with Basil Hall's own impressions of them, gleaned from a day excursion into their country:

What we heard of Hungary did not very much tempt us to go far into that still half-savage region. The peasantry are kept in a deplorable state of subjection by their Lords, who, if not vested with the power of life and death, in all cases where their will and pleasure is contradicted, possess the power of punishing corporally and summarily whoever may chance to offend them. (Hall, p. 68)

This may explain why Le Fanu has Carmilla, on being 'insulted' by the mountebank, declare that her own father would have had him 'burnt to the bones with the castle brand' (le Fanu, p. 269), rather than allowing him, as Laura does, to walk on.

From a political point of view Hall's memoir may also have presented Styria as a potential site of political tensions with the Ottomans in preference to Hungary or other parts of Austria. Hall also describes how Schloss Riegersburg, a ruined castle still possessed by the Purgstalls, had stood as a rock against the Ottoman raider (Hall, p.52)

This historical detail may explain why Le Fanu decided to include the 'hideous black woman with a sort of coloured turban on her head' (Le Fanu, p. 257) in Carmilla's coach, who is seen only by Mademoiselle De Lafontaine: the emissary of a vengeful but vanquished Ottoman invader, now siding with the 'half-savage' Hungarians against the Austrians.[19]

Countess Purgstall relates many stories to Captain Hall, many of which have either a macabre or Romantic twist. One tale of particular relevance to 'Carmilla' concerns a schoolmaster on the river Tweed, who one day received peculiar visitors:

The schoolmaster, who was quite a young man, and just established in his laborious office, opened the door himself, and was rather surprised to see an elderly woman holding in her hand a very pretty person, at whose breast was an infant. (Hall, pp. 157-8)

The next day the elderly woman is no longer there, leaving a young woman who turns out to be deaf and dumb. The schoolmaster marries her, has children by her, and discovers, from eavesdroppers, that she can in fact speak and hear. When he confronts her, she declares that he should never have done so, and disappears (p. 163). After a while all their children are ill from neglect, but, thanks to the annual visit of the old woman, who knows the younger woman's whereabouts, the deaf-mute is induced to return and look after the children, and her husband never confronts her again. Hall concludes that this story is almost certainly tinged with a 'German fancy' (p. 166) rather than a Scottish reality, but students of 'Carmilla' will no doubt see similar elements to the arrival of the vampire and her 'mother' at Laura's Schloss.

Laura's castle, admittedly, does not bear much resemblance to the 'Portuguese' style Schloss Hainfeld (p. 29): no castle that Hall visits is described as possessing a drawbridge, while Schloss Hainfeld - the only castle he enters still in a good state of repair - is depicted as possessing a quadrangle with staircases leading up from it (p. 29). His descriptions of the ruins of Riegersberg, Gleichenberg and Steinberg, however, may well have contributed to Le Fanu's presentation of Castle Karnstein when Laura, her father and General Spielsdorf first arrive there. Laura recounts how:

A vista opened in the forest; we were on a sudden under the chimneys and gables of the ruined village, and the towers and battlements of the dismantled castle, round which gigantic trees are grouped, overhung us from a slight eminence.

In a frightened dream I got down from the carriage, and in silence, for we had each abundant matter for thinking; we soon mounted the ascent, and were among the spacious chambers, winding stairs, and dark corridors of the castle.

'And this was once the palatial residence of the Karnsteins!' said the old General at length, as from a great window he looked out across the village, and saw the wide, undulating expanse of the forest. (Le Fanu, p. 305)

In Hall's memoir both Riegersberg and Gleichenberg are ruins covered in foliage, but it is Gleichenberg, the home of the Trautsmandorfs, which bears the greatest similarity to the impression of approaching Karnstein and its castle:

The luster of the decaying foliage, like the colours of the dying dolphin, almost dazzled the sight; and the thick woods on every side crowded so close upon the castle, that until we came near it we could scarcely see even the turrets... (Hall, pp. 61-2)

Unlike Bram Stoker, who frequently takes whole sentences from E. C. Johnson's work On the Track of the Crescent,[20] so sophisticated a writer as Le Fanu cannot be expected to have lifted complete phrases from a source. Nevertheless, it is not too much to suggest that the Gothic descriptions of these two ruined castles, as well as the large dense 'foliage' around them, influence the impression of suddenly encountering, through the forest, the ruined village and then castle battlements of Karnstein. The chapel of Karnstein is also described as 'darkened by the towering foliage that rose on every side, dense and high above its noiseless walls' (Le Fanu, p.311).

Indeed, Hall's description of yet another decaying castle, Schloss Steinberg, may also have influenced the features of Karnstein castle in 'Carmilla'. The Halls come across Baron Steinberg:

...after a strange navigation through broken down corridors and crazy stairs which conducted us to a passage high up, from which we again made a steep descent as if we had been going into a cellar. The rooms, however, were light, and most cheerful, with windows looking over the prettiest part of the country. (Hall, pp. 65-6)

Castle Karnstein similarly enjoys 'dark corridors' and 'winding stairs', but also 'spacious chambers' and a window looking out over 'undulating ... forest', despite its otherwise global decay (Le Fanu, p. 311).

'Bertha Rheinfeldt', the poor young lady whom Carmilla kills before we even meet her, and who is the delight of her Uncle, General Spielsdorf, may also have been suggested by a young lady who stays, with several others, at the Schloss with the Halls. All are on the marriage market and busy attending balls at the local houses, but still find time to endear themselves to the Scottish family. Amongst them there is a delicate girl (never named) who writes English poetry that fails to impress them (p. 80). One night she is left out in the cold with her friends at Gratz when waiting for a caleche to take her back from a ball - with fatal consequences:

In this brief interval the nipping hard frost had struck its icy and deadly fangs into the pretty bud which was beginning to open. The youngest of our lively friends - the poor poetess withal - was taken so ill, almost immediately, that she was carried off by a rapid decline in the course of a few weeks! (p.90)

The reference to 'icy and deadly fangs' is a metaphor that Le Fanu may have seen as ripe for making literal, and thus contributed to his development of the vampire theme; however, the fact that this poor young lady stayed at Hainfeld may have also decided him upon naming the General's niece with the derivative form 'Rheinfeldt'.

There are many more names in Le Fanu’s work which appear to be derived from Hall’s account. The name Vordernberg, which belongs to the Baron who helps identify the site of Carmilla's tomb, and who has previously helped the local people deal with other vampires in Karnstein, is, of course, suggested by the name of the Archduke John's seat in Upper Styria, Vordernberg (where he passes a considerable portion of the year). Although originally thought to be a Moravian in Le Fanu's story, it transpires that the Baron Vordenberg comes originally from nearby, 'in Gratz, where, living upon a pittance, which was all that remained to him of the once princely estates of his family, in Upper Styria, he devoted himself to the minute and laborious investigation of the marvelously authenticated tradition of vampirism' (Le Fanu p. 316). In terms of correspondence to reality, it is fitting that he who rids Styria of its vampires in the story should be named after the real citizen of Styria whom locals believe should be its ruler (Hall, pp. 98-9), and whom Hall suggests could put all of Austria to rights (p. 100), but is sadly deprived the power as a result of his juniority as a Hapsburg – indeed, it perhaps constitutes a more serious way in which Le Fanu uses the vampire fiction to represent historical reality, by linking the name of a good Archduke in real life to the implicit problems of the Hungarian presence in Austria, hence allowing the Gothic fantasy to be more closely implicated in Styria’s genuine history.

Other names in 'Carmilla' are also possible derivations of names in this work. The town of Dranfeld (p. 290), from which Laura's post arrives, is arguably another metalepsis of Hainfeld; the ‘Drunstall’ road (p. 295), on which the General travels to reach Karnstein, is again arguably inspired by the name Purgstall.

Amongst the named major characters in the work (that is, excluding the servants),[21] only 'General Spielsdorf' and 'Doctor Spielsberg' have no basis in Hall's account.[22] The German term 'Spiel', meaning 'play' in the sense of 'game' or 'acting', is a word that Hall at no time mentions either singly or in a compound form. Does this indicate, along with the rather hibernicised forms of Dranfeld and Drunstall, that his borrowing of names is more haphazard than originally asserted? In fact, they could point to an even greater degree of deliberation, since the two characters, the doctor and the General, are the only named, major characters in 'Carmilla'- that is, those integrally connected with the action -which are entirely fictitious, having no basis in reality. The young Bertha Rheinfeldt is based on the 'poor poetess' who stays at Hainfeld, taken off by the 'deadly fangs' of a chill (Hall, p.90); Baron Vordernberg, who cures the region of its vampirism in the tale, is a loose allusion to Archduke John, the very man who, as Hall believes, could cure both Styria and Austria of its political malaise (Hall, pp.98-9); Laura and Carmilla are divided versions of Countess Purgstall, nee Cranstoun. Only the Doctor and the General are entirely fictitious and 'play' characters, denoted through 'play' names.

All in all, the names, Gothic details, anecdotes, and physical descriptions in Basil Hall's Schloss Hainfeld: or, a Winter in Lower Styria point to it having been a major source for Le Fanu's Carmilla. We can see that while the development of Countess Purgstall into two separate characters adds support to the 'uncanny' and 'mirroring' theories of Dolar and Sage - that Carmilla is either the repressed unconscious of Laura, or else her completion - since both would seem to spring from the same real-life character, Jane Anne Cranstoun, Countess Purgstall. Furthermore , Le Fanu's work appears to be both inspired by, and a tribute to a lady who played the seminal role in publishing Sir Walter Scott's first work, a translation of Buerger's 'Leonora'. However, perhaps more seriously, his use of the name ‘Vordernberg’ - who in the 1830s was the figure who could most obviously reform the region – for the Baron who destroys the vampire in 1848-9 (implicitly the Hungarian uprising, with bearings upon the Ausgleich between Austria and Hungary which was still recent when Le Fanu was writing), points to an attempt to use the Gothic to stress real points about a political crisis, as though the vampire story is genuinely a reference – even if a coded one – to genuine forces in history.

III

Quite apart from its potential as a source for 'Carmilla', Hall's work should be examined for its own Gothic elements. The memoir has many features worthy of Gothic fiction, despite its real-life basis: an emaciated hostess with a sense of the macabre; ruined castles; fantastic stories within stories like the dumb wife of the river Tweed and the wife in the iron mask; near intimation of the supernatural, when the Countess's prediction of her own death date, just after the vernal equinox, comes true to Hall's own great surprise (p. 304); and finally, a long reference to Buerger's 'Leonora'. All these details show the potential for seeing Hall's memoir as a work that blends real life with Gothic romance in order to stimulate the reader's interest.

One major difference, however, between Hall's memoir and Gothic genres is that the naval Captain's work possesses neither terror nor horror in the classic Burkean and Radcliffean senses. The account of the death of the poor poetess is told as an ironic twist rather than as a tragic event; the story of the woman whose beauty is concealed in the iron mask by her jealous husband, is treated in the same way, when Hall concludes by telling us that the concealment simply enticed her lovers even more (p. 88); the story of the deaf mute wife on the Tweed Hall treats with scorn, calling it an example of 'German fancy' (p. 202). Hall writes a humourous account of a Gothic region, rather than a Gothic romance, which thus deflates any potential for either terror or horror.

This is partly to do with his rationalist posture. He expresses extreme disdain towards Austria politically, whose ills he blames mainly on Catholicism, and expresses thanks that he himself lives in a democracy with a Protestant Church (p. 202). Styria, therefore, he presents as a charming, but irrational place, from whose excesses he always keeps a measured distance. Another reason for the lack of Gothic sentiment is that Hall, being an ex-Naval captain who had seen some of the worst fighting in the Napoleonic wars, possesses an admirable sang froid towards the gruesome and frightening, even ensuring that his children attend the Countess upon the point of death in order to teach them 'how to look upon such scenes with composure and without feeling' and relieve them of 'that mysterious sort of dread of a deathbed which belongs to ignorance' (p. 303).

It is Le Fanu who, by dividing the Countess into two different characters, dissolves Hall's cheery skepticism to induce the reader to feel terror at Laura's danger, and horror at Carmilla's depravity. Similarly, his account of Bertha Rheinfeldt and use of Baron Vordernberg’s name also allows his gothic fiction to both allude to and transform an original account that is occasionally lacking in moral seriousness into one which allegorizes the politics of Austria and Hungary through vampirism, but with an added attachment to real historical circumstances. Finally, Styria's decayed Schlosses, impoverished aristocrats and pervasive sense of superstition are free to grip both Laura and the reader with terror and horror in a work that pays homage to one of its most eccentric and illustrious inhabitants, who was also a pioneer in the history of publishing Gothic literature in Britain. For all these reasons, Hall's memoir appears to have been a most likely inspiration for Le Fanu's tale, and also appears to play a further role in grounding its transformative reality, making ‘Carmilla’ more a work of intertextual reference to another work than one that has been inspired by an absent source.

[1] This corresponds to work from the Dutch Gleaner cited by Calmet, Augustin, The Phantom World: or, the Philosophy of Spirits, Apparitions etc, ed and trans Rev Henry Christmas, 2 vols (London: Richard Bentley, 1850), II, 48-9.

[2] Marigny, Jean, Vampires (London and Paris: Gallimard, 1994), p. 37.

[3] Baring-Gould, Sabine, The Book of Were-wolves (London: Senate, 1995), p. 139

[4] Nethercott, Arthur H., 'Coleridge's "Christabel" and Le Fanu's "Carmilla"', Modern Philology, 147 (1949). See also Silvani, Giovanna, Analisi di un Racconto Gotico: Camilla di J. S. Le Fanu, Quaderni dell'instituto di Lingue e Letterature Germaniche no 3.Universita degli studi di Parma (Roma: Bulzoni, 1984), p. 31.

[5] Gibson, Matthew, Dracula and the Eastern Question: British and French Vampire Narratives of the Nineteenth Century Near East (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmuillan, 2006), p. 53

[6] Leger, Louis, A History of Austro-Hungary from the Earliest Time to the Year 1889, trans. From the French by Mrs. Birkbeck Hill (London: Rivingtons, 1889), p. 337.

[7] Szabad, Emeric, Hungary: Past and Present: Embracing its History from the Magyar Conquest to the Present Time (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1854), p.341.

[8] The Dark Blue, ed. John C. Freund, 4 Vols (1870-1873) (London: British and Colonial Publishing Co, 1872), II (March-August 1872).

[9] Kohl, Johann Georg, Austria, Vienna, Prague, Hungary, Bohemia and the Danube; Galicia, Styria, Moravia, Bukovina, and the Military Frontier (London: 1843). Kohl visits Gratz, meets the Archduke (p. 391), and visits Vordernberg (p. 399). He is chiefly interested in the mines of Styria, and the mental illness cretinism.

[10] Frankland, Capt Charles Colville, Travels to and From Constantinople in the Years 1827 and 1828..., 2 vols (London, Henry Colburn, 1830).

[11] New, Rev Alfred H., The History of Austria from The Earliest Ages to Present Time (London: James Blackwood, 1859), p. 42.

[12] Turnbull, Peter Evan, Austria, 2 vols [Narrative of Travels, vol 1] (London: John Murray, 1850), I, 184.

[13] Hall, Captain Basil, Schloss Hainfeld; or, a Winter in Lower Styria (Edingurgh: Robert, Cadell, 1836), pp. 1-3.

[14] Place names in Hungary were in any case frequently known all over the continent by their Austrian, and hence German language equivalent, although the same would not be true of family names.

[15] The penultimate chapter of the book deals with Countess Purgstall nee Cranstoun's concealment in the ancestral vault, when she is lowered into the crypt by pulleys (Hall, p.328).

[16] Montague Summers cites Hall's book when discussing the history of Leonora's reception in Britain, but points to the fact that Scott also attributed another source for his original interest in the ballad. Summers, Montague, The Vampire: its Kith and Kin (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co, 1928), p. 275.

[17] Dolar, Mladen, ' "I shall be with you on your Wedding Night": Lacan and the Uncanny, October, 58: 5-23.

[18] Sage, Victor, Le Fanu's Gothic: the Rhetoric of Darkness (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), p. 178.

[19] As indeed had happened historically, when Prince Tokoli of Hungary joined forces with the Turks in the seventeenth century - Szabad, Hungary, p. 126

[20] Major E. C Johnson,. On the Track of the Crescent (London: Hurst and Blacket, 1885).

[21] We never discover the name of Laura's father.

[22] In The Phantom World, there is a character called Des Fontaines: a possible inspiriation for Mlle De Lafontaine - Calmet, The Phantom World, II, 152.