I also studied the Victorian fascination with the metaphysical.
Because these asylum scenes are crucial to both the plot and the themes of my book, I scoured the archives of late 19 th century insane asylums. This is also true of Dracula in Love, but I wanted to recreate the asylum as it would have been in the late Victorian era-not inhabited by an insect-eating vampire slave like Stoker’s Renfield, but full of women, committed for having what we today would consider normal sexual attitudes and desires. Those who have read Dracula know that a good portion of the book takes place in an insane asylum. Walking in the footsteps of the characters is a crucial part of my process, so I also traveled to southern Austria and the west coast of Ireland, where I set Mina’s birthplace. I moved to London so that I could haunt its streets and its museums, breathing in the atmosphere as I wrote. I researched late Victorian art, culture, costume, design, sexual and social mores, religious beliefs, and laws concerning the rights, or lack thereof, of women. I wanted to give Mina and Lucy rich, full lives, as well as plausible inner lives that made sense in the era in which they lived, but also reflected the breadth of women’s desires. My ambition for Dracula in Love was to turn the original story inside out.
In the pre-feminist construct, the bad girl is punished the good girl rewarded. The vampire’s kiss was a thinly veiled metaphor for-you guessed it-sex. Though Stoker’s Dracula was a brilliant creation and a haunting story, when it came to the women, he wrote like a man of his time, constructing the typical paradigm of bad girl (Lucy Westenra, who succumbs to the vampire’s seduction) versus the good girl (Mina Harker, who does not). Little did I dream that many years later, I would actually revise the story, retelling it from Mina’s perspective. Karen Essex talks about how she reclaimed - and reframed - the vampire myth by exploring its female origins in her new novel, Dracula in Love :įrom the first time I read Bram Stoker’s Dracula in my teens, I just knew that Mina was not satisfied with her role as the quintessential Victorian virgin.
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