Dracula in Love

Author’s Notes

My dear Mina, why are men so noble when we women are so little worthy of them?”

“A brave man’s blood is the best thing on this earth when a woman is in trouble.”

Bram Stoker wrote these lines and many like them in his novel Dracula without a trace of irony. Today, the text is often read as a cautionary tale against the unbridling of female sexuality at the end of the nineteenth century. In this vein, I wanted to turn the original story inside out and expose its underbelly or its “subconscious mind,” by illuminating the cultural fears, as well as the rich brew of myths and lore, that went into Stoker’s creation.

At the time Dracula was written, while some women were taking to the streets for emancipation, the majority clung feverishly to Victorian ideals of purity and piety, which were considered the norm. I chose to portray Dr. Seward’s asylum as it would have been-not with an insect-eating madman but full of female patients incarcerated for what we today would consider normal sexual appetites. My portraits of the asylum’s cases are largely taken from original late-nineteenth-century physicians’ notes in the archives of Bethlem Royal Hospital, once known as Bedlam. (The obvious exceptions are Von Helsinger’s experiment to improve the female sex through the transfusion of male blood, and the inference that Lucy and Vivienne died of hemolytic reactions from receiving incompatible blood types.)

I experienced two extraordinary coincidences in conducting my research. I had set the place of Mina’s birth as Sligo before I discovered that Stoker’s mother was born there and had raised her son on its ghost stories and folklore. Secondly, I had fabricated the character of a journalist who had been Mina’s school chum and named her Julia Reed long before I read in Stoker’s notes that he had toyed with including a character named Kate Reed who was to be Mina’s friend. Stoker’s original setting for Dracula’s home was Styria, and I decided to use that location, if only to remind vampire fans that the Count’s Transylvanian origin was Stoker’s invention, and that he entertained other possibilities.

The vampire that sprang from Bram Stoker’s mind has subsequently spawned hundreds of variations. I wanted to illuminate the historical and mythological sources for the creature that so ignited my childhood imagination, while revisiting the lost landscape of female magical power that clearly informed Stoker’s tale and shaped vampire lore. My fond hope is that both readers and the eternal essence of Mr. Stoker, whom I revere for his ingenious work, will take the book in the spirit of fun and adventure in which it was written.