Florence Marryat’s Female Vampire and the Scientizing of Hybridity

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.