Horror · Gothic
Carmilla
A lonely girl in a remote castle welcomes a mysterious guest who sleeps all day.
Five levels, about 80 languages
- A2ElementaryShort sentences and everyday words.
- B1IntermediateYou follow clear stories about familiar things.
- B2Upper intermediateLonger sentences, richer vocabulary.
- C1AdvancedClose to the original, lightly condensed.
- C2ProficientThe complete novel.
One purchase is one book, in one language, at one level: $4.99. Another level of a book you own is $1.99. Editions nobody has asked for yet are written on request: chapter 1 in a few minutes, the rest while you read. How the levels work.
About the book
A guest at the castle
Laura lives with her father, a retired Englishman, in a lonely castle in the forests of Styria, in Austria. She is nineteen and has almost no companions her own age. At dinner the household mixes English, French and German, which produces, she admits, “a Babel, at which strangers used to laugh”. One evening a carriage overturns near the castle; inside is a beautiful, fragile girl whose mother must travel on urgently and leaves her in their care. Her name is Carmilla. She and Laura become close friends, though Carmilla sleeps until the afternoon, never joins in prayers and refuses to say where she comes from. Meanwhile, girls in the villages nearby are falling ill. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, an Irish master of the ghost story, collected it in 1872 in In a Glass Darkly.
Why it works for learners
Carmilla is short, and Laura narrates it years later: personal, clear and full of feeling. The story is built on mood more than action (the forest, moonlight, a ruined village, dreams) and on a growing unease you can feel even in simple language. The vocabulary centers on the house, the body, illness, night and friendship. It appeared twenty-five years before Dracula, and the two make an excellent pair.
Which level to start at
B1 is the natural start: the plot is compact and the atmosphere comes through. B2 lets you appreciate the ambiguity of Laura and Carmilla’s intense friendship, a large part of the book’s fame. At C1 and C2 Le Fanu’s Victorian prose is lush but readable.
Read next
- Dracula, Stoker’s Count, a generation later
- The Turn of the Screw, another young woman, another isolated house
- Jane Eyre, a heroine alone in a house with a secret