Customer Reviews

The Blood of the Vampire

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this book was fast-paced, quirky and brilliant, the psychic vampire concept is ultimately wrenching and frightening, isolating and Marryat is a great writer; her characters are fleshed out and have their own voice. truly a great read one of the best i've been through in a LONG long time.

Florence Marryat is such a talented and original writer, I'm amazed that she's been nearly forgotten for a century. I loved this book - and wish all seventy of her novels were in print.

Marryat's vampire story was published in 1897, the same year that Bram Stoker's Dracula appeared. Dracula lived on, yet Marryat's novel is just as deserving and far more psychologically interesting, to my mind.

Harriet Brandt does not drink blood; she's a psychic vampire who, all unconsciously, draws the life out of those she loves.

We meet her at a seaside resort in Belgium, a startlingly beautiful young woman eager to make friends. She's alone in the world, with plenty of money and a magnetic sensuality. After a childhood running wild on her father's Jamaican plantation, followed by ten years in a convent, she has no idea how to behave in polite society.

Harriet suffers from the consequences of heredity - a subject of great fascination to science-mad Victorians. Her father was a scientist who practiced atrocious experiments on his slaves. Her mother had a fiendish blood lust. Reputedly Harriet's maternal grandmother was bitten by a vampire bat.

This horrific ancestry is poignantly combined with keen intelligence and an affectionate nature. The reader's ambiguous feelings about Harriet, who is both victim and unwilling victimizer, are what make this novel so compelling. Harriet Brandt, despite her tainted blood, is ultimately a heroic figure.

Marryat has peopled her gothic tale with a delightful mix of upright Victorians and ludicrous eccentrics. The plot is a feast of love conflicts, violated social taboos and medical interventions nineteenth-century style.

My thanks go to Victorian Secrets for reviving this and other lost nineteenth-century gems - and to the editor for writing such an excellent introduction.

I wrote a critical paper on vampires and feminism so even though I've always been a vampire fan I was searching for new vampire books I'd never read before that I might be able to use. I read The Blood of the Vampire shortly after Dracula.

For people who enjoy Victorian literature, this might be an enjoyable novel. There are just few that I can tolerate reading. (Oscar Wilde is one of the few I enjoy because the dialogue is always witty and clever and there's always many layers of the plot to analyze.) Like most Victorian novels, I found The Blood of the Vampire to be slow, with long scenes where the characters do little more than gossip with one another while the action is glazed over. Also, the events are terribly predictable, which makes the novel seem even more tedious. Overall, the story is stereotypical of its time and the writing and dialogue are mediocre at best.

Although it's tolerable to read, its not enjoyable. I kept reading, hoping it would improve. It didn't.