Carmilla was serialized in The Dark Blue in 1871 and 1872 and collected in Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly in 1872. The countess of Karnstein returns across centuries as Mircalla, Carmilla, and Millarca, each an anagram of the others, attaching herself to one young woman per generation. The ending is folklore procedure run by paperwork: an imperial commission opens the tomb, finds the body immersed in blood, faintly breathing, eyes open, and proceeds through stake, beheading, fire, and ashes in the river, in that order.
The influence chain is visible in Stoker's own paperwork. His surviving notes, housed at the Rosenbach Museum, show Dracula's castle first placed in Styria, Carmilla's country, before the move to Transylvania; scholars list the echoes, Laura and Lucy, Baron Vordenburg and Van Helsing, Karnstein and Carfax, and Stoker's posthumous Dracula's Guest reads like a deleted Carmilla chapter. The famous count inherited his invitation rules, his shapeshifting, and half his supporting cast from a novella the public forgot.
The onomastic reading, developed in Amy Leal's 2007 study of the names: Carmilla never truly lies about who she is. The letters are on the table every generation; what fails is the reading, not the warning. On this account the novella is about legibility: desire makes the victims and their families illiterate on purpose, since solving the name would end the visit. Modern scholarship also files Carmilla as the prototype of the queer vampire in fiction, a reading the text's own language of rapture and humiliation carries openly.
Why does the oldest seductive vampire in English fiction come back under anagrams, and why does nobody solve them in time?