Abstract

This essay relates the titular character of Florence Marryat’s 1897 novel, The Blood of the Vampire, to other sexual/racial hybrids of the nineteenth century such as Charlotte Brontë’s Bertha Mason and Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Elsie Venner. Marryat draws upon pseudoscientific theories of “maternal impressions” to create Harriet Brandt, a female vampire whose depiction might not have been out of place in contemporary medical journals such as The Lancet. Her sympathetic and realistic portrait of Harriet exposes the instabilities in fin-de-siècle thinking about race, gender, and species.

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