Florence Marryat

Florence Marryat (1833–1899), daughter of the sea-novelist Captain Marryat, was a busy Victorian author, actress and committed spiritualist. Her novel The Blood of the Vampire (1897), published the same year as Dracula, offers a very different ‘psychic vampire’ heroine and is now studied as a striking counterpoint in the vampire tradition. Her spiritualist writings reflect the era’s fascination with the beyond.