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The frontispiece from the 1820 edition of ‘The Bride of the Isles’.
HARPER
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017
Selection, Introduction, and Notes © Richard Dalby and Brian J. Frost 2017
Cover design and illustration by Mike Topping © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008216481
Ebook Edition © May 2017 ISBN: 9780008216498
Version: 2017-04-05
Contents
The Bride of the Isles by Anonymous (1820)
The Unholy Compact Abjured by Charles Pigault-Lebrun (1825)
The Burgomaster in Bottle by Erckmann-Chatrian (1849)
Lost in a Pyramid; or, The Mummy’s Curse by Louisa May Alcott (1869)
Professor Brankel’s Secret by Fergus Hume (1882)
John Barrington Cowles by Arthur Conan Doyle (1884)
Manor by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1884)
Old Aeson by Arthur Quiller-Couch (1890)
The Mask by Richard Marsh (1892)
The Last of the Vampires by Phil Robinson (1893)
The Story of Jella and the Macic by Professor P. Jones (1895)
The Ring of Knowledge by William Beer (1896)
A Beautiful Vampire by Arabella Kenealy (1896)
The Story of Baelbrow by E. & H. Heron (1898)
The Purple Terror by Fred M. White (1899)
Glámr by Sabine Baring-Gould (1904)
The Vampire Nemesis by ‘Dolly’ (1905)
The Electric Vampire by F. H. Power (1910)
ARRANGED chronologically, the nineteen stories in this anthology are culled from books and magazines published between 1820 and 1910, a period noted for producing some of the finest vampire tales ever written. The first vampire story to make a significant impact on European literature was ‘The Vampyre,’ by John William Polidori, which set a precedent by depicting the vampire as an aristocrat. Erroneously attributed to Lord Byron when it was first published in the April 1819 issue of The New Monthly Magazine, this story subsequently inspired a surge of popular interest in vampires and established the vampire’s image as a fatal lover.
In 1820 the French author Cyprien Bérard penned a novel-length sequel to Polidori’s story, titling it Lord Ruthwen ou les Vampires. This, in turn, formed the basis for James R. Planché’s play The Vampire; or, The Bride of the Isles, which had its first performance on the London stage in August 1820. Not long afterwards an anonymously-written short story adapted from the play, bearing the title ‘The Bride of the Isles: A Tale Founded on the Popular Legend of the Vampire,’ was put on sale by an enterprising Dublin publisher. Better than most vampire tales written in the early 1800s, its inclusion in the present volume marks its first appearance in an anthology exclusively devoted to vampire fiction.
The earliest known vampire story by an American