And I'm surely not alone in finding Stoker's Lucy one of the more memorable characters in popular fiction. If his female characters aren't what modern readers might relate to, their creator is merely a man of his time. It was news to me that Stoker was particularly sexist. Pursued by several suitors, Lucy eventually marries one of them but shortly afterwards is committed to a lunatic asylum and dies.Įssex states in a note, however, that her aim was to turn Stoker's narrative inside-out, exposing what she sees as its anti-female bias. Meanwhile, several voices, though none quite as haunting as this, are calling to her heiress friend, Lucy. It begins promisingly, with Mina hearing a man's voice calling to her as she sleeps. Initially, you might think Karen Essex's Dracula in Love - a retelling of Stoker's novel from the point of view of one of his characters, Mina - will follow a familiar story. In this, I wasn't different from past generations of young women who - since Bela Lugosi made the role his own in the early 20th century - had been swooning at the idea of an elegant older man climbing through their bedroom windows and taking them to heights of carnal ecstasy. In my early teens, I had a torrid fantasy affair with the actor Louis Jourdan, whose suave interpretation of the title character in a television adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula turned my budding erotic imaginings haemosexual.
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