Everybody knows about Bram Stoker’s DRACULA (1897). Few vampire fans, however, much less general readers, are familiar with what might be called Stoker’s “other vampire novel,” THE LADY OF THE SHROUD (1909). Actually (no big spoiler), it’s not a genuine vampire story, but a plot based on a hoax. The hero doesn’t discover the truth until well into the book, though. This novel is an adventure tale with more similarities to THE PRISONER OF ZENDA (1894) than DRACULA. A wealthy Englishman unexpectedly leaves his fortune to his world-traveling nephew, Rupert Sent Leger. As a condition of the inheritance, Rupert has to live in a castle in a tiny Balkan country called the Land of the Blue Mountains. The novel follows the typical plot of a Ruritanian romance, in which a dashing foreign hero (English or sometimes American) saves the realm and falls in love with the princess. It's obvious, however, that Stoker also drew on his research for DRACULA in composing this tale.
Like DRACULA, THE LADY OF THE SHROUD has an epistolary narrative structure. It begins with a magazine story about an apparition of a coffin-like boat bearing a woman in a shroud. Most of the book consists of entries from Rupert’s journal, supplemented by letters and other documents. Once settled in the castle, formerly the home of the voivode (ruler) of the country, Rupert receives a visit from a woman of unearthly beauty “wrapped in white graveclothes saturated with water.” In addition to the shroud she wears, other factors such the chill of her skin, her need to be helped over the threshold of his room, and her insistence on fleeing at cockcrow lead him to seriously entertain the possibility that she may be a vampire. During the day he explores an ancient church nearby and finds her in the crypt, lying in a glass-topped coffin like a vampiric Snow White. Because of his many extraordinary experiences in exotic parts of the world, Rupert, like Van Helsing, has an open mind about the preternatural and occult. But unlike any of the characters in DRACULA, Rupert speculates whether the lady, if a vampire, could be redeemed and restored to life. That idea never comes up in the earlier book, where vampires are demonically evil by definition.
The lady turns out to be the voivodin (princess) of the Land of the Blue Mountains, carrying out the vampire masquerade for protection from her enemies. Having fallen into a cataleptic trance (a phenomenon that scholars have often cited as one hypothetical source of vampire beliefs), she had been pronounced dead and interred, a mistake she uses to her advantage. Rupert, of course, saves both the voivodin and her nation, rescuing his beloved and her father from Turkish kidnappers. THE LADY OF THE SHROUD has the distinction of possibly including the first fictional portrayal of aircraft combat, only six years after the Wright Brothers’ first flight.
Although lesser known than DRACULA, this novel and Stoker’s tale of a mummified Egyptian princess trying to return to life, THE JEWEL OF SEVEN STARS (1903), both hold up well as thrilling stories still worth a read today.
Margaret L. Carter
Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.
Posts
