SOURCE: "Coleridge's Cristabel and Le Fanu's Carmilla," in Modern Philology, Vol. XL VII, No. 1, August, 1949, pp. 32-8.

In the excerpt below, Nethercot points out parallels between Le Fanu's story "Carmilla" and Coleridge's poem "Christabel. "

Several years ago in a study of Coleridge's poem "Christabel"¹ I advanced the then novel theory that the unfinished tale is essentially a vampire story, one of the first and by far the subtlest of the many such stories in the English language. The theory was received with considerable interest and general approval, though there were, of course, some partial or complete skeptics. I now wish to suggest that the long prose narrative "Carmilla," published with four other stories in In a Glass Darkly in 1872 by that once famed master of the Gothic, J. Sheridan LeFanu, contains so many strange parallels to "Christabel" that it seems possible that LeFanu had either made the same...