Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873) was an Irish novelist, journalist and writer of ghost stories, born in Dublin into a Huguenot-descended family and educated at Trinity College Dublin. He trained for the bar but turned to journalism, owning and editing Dublin newspapers and, from 1861 to 1869, the Dublin University Magazine. His best-known novels are The House by the Churchyard (1863) and Uncle Silas (1864); his late collection In a Glass Darkly (1872), which contains Carmilla and Green Tea, made him a founding figure of the Victorian supernatural tale.
Carmilla is a Gothic vampire novella narrated by Laura, the nineteen-year-old daughter of an Englishman who retired from the Austrian service and bought a lonely castle in the forests of Styria. A brief prologue presents the story as a case from the papers of the physician Doctor Hesselius and notes that its narrator has since died.
