the blood of the vampire florence marryat

Her brows were arched and delicately pencilled and her nose was straight and small. Her eyes, long-shaped dark and narrow with heavy lids and thick black lashes which lay upon her cheeks. It looked almost boneless as she swayed easily from side to side of her chair. Her figure was tall but slight and lissom. “She was a remarkable looking girl-more remarkable perhaps than beautiful, for her beauty did not strike one at first sight. Into this milieu comes a strange young woman named Harriet Brandt: The story opens in Belgium, where members of high society have gathered into a pleasure-seeking community, their mores described with satirical bite by Marryat. Instead, it is a curious relic of a time when readers had different expectations from vampire fiction.

But as a story, The Blood of the Vampire shows no sign of being influenced by Stoker’s interpretation of the vampire theme. Certainly, the book’s review in The Speaker characterised it as a mere rider of Dracula’s coat-tails. It is possible that the publication of Stoker’s novel inspired Marryat to try her hand at a vampire story. While his contemporaries may not have achieved the same immortality, Bram Stoker was certainly not the only Victorian writer to tell a tale of vampires.įlorence Marryat’s novel The Blood of the Vampire was published in 1897, the same year as Dracula. But if we go back in time, we see a different story, or rather, different stories. Subsequent generations of writers in the genre have had to define their works only in relation to this novel, whether they were adhering to its example or departing from it. Vampire fiction was crystallised in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

The blood of the vampire florence marryat