Bram Stoker

The Lady Of The Shroud Bram Stoker

In 1909 Bram Stoker set out to recreate the success of Dracula with another novel about a vampire, The Lady of the Shroud. However, this time the book performed a narrative and generic volte-face in which the seeming vampire was revealed to be in fact a living girl reduced to sleeping in a coffin for political rather than supernatural reasons. As a result, a book which had begun with a High Gothic encounter between living and seemingly dead concludes with a celebration of the newly established Balkan Federation brokered by the hero, the charismatic, seven-foot-tall Irishman Rupert Sent Leger; he has won both the crown of the Land of the Blue Mountains and the hand of the lovely Teuta, that being the name of the girl in the coffin.