The Vampyre and Carmilla

John Polidori (1795–1821) was born in London to an Italian immigrant father and English mother. He studied medicine at Edinburgh University, graduated at the age of just nineteen, and in 1816 became physician to Lord Byron. He accompanied Byron on a tour through Europe, famously spending the summer at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland where they regularly met with the poet Percy Shelley, his partner Mary Godwin (later Shelley), and her half-sister Claire Clairmont. It was here that Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein was inspired, influenced in part by Polidori’s conversation and behavior—as recorded in Polidori’s diary. Although Polidori’s fractious relationship with Byron led them to part ways, they remained on cordial terms until the publication of Polidori’s tale ‘The Vampyre’ in 1819, which was willfully misattributed to Byron by the publisher Henry Colburn. Polidori was attempting to realize his literary ambitions by publishing ‘The Vampyre’, extracts from his diary, a volume of drama and poetry, and a novel begun at Diodati (Ernestus Berchthold; or, The Modern Œdipus). However, the controversy surrounding ‘The Vampyre’ sank his writing career and he published little else. He died by his own hand in 1821.

Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873) was born in Dublin to staunch Protestant parents descended from French Huguenots. He studied law at Trinity College Dublin, and while he maintained a somewhat desultory legal practice after graduating, his chief energies were directed towards fiction and journalism. He published his first novel, the historical adventure The Cock and the Anchor, in 1845, and edited a number of newspapers during his lifetime—notably the Dublin University Magazine, in which he serialized his own stories and, despite his Irish nationalist tory sympathies, took a relaxed editorial line. He found his distinctive authorial voice in mysteries and thrillers such as The House by the Church-Yard (1861–3), Wylder’s Hand (1863–4), and Uncle Silas (1864), and in his collections of uncanny and supernatural tales—most famously In a Glass Darkly (1872)—which are often haunted by Irish politics and history. Known as ‘The Invisible Prince’ in Dublin due to his solitary and nocturnal lifestyle, Le Fanu died a recluse in 1873.