From Emma at her Past Life, Present Cleavage substack, October 12:
Florence Balcombe was the pretty one. In 1870s Dublin that was practically a job title, and she did it so well that men wrote her letters, and one of the men writing letters was a very young Oscar Wilde. He was at Oxford, not famous yet, already dressing like he knew he would be. At some point he gave her a small gold cross.
She married Bram Stoker instead.
I think about this choice more than is healthy. Bram was a civil servant at Dublin Castle who reviewed plays for free on the side, a big athletic bearded Irishman, and Oscar was Oscar. When Wilde heard about the engagement he wrote asking for the cross back, which is petty in a way I find deeply relatable, and then he stayed friendly with the Stokers for years anyway. Bram moved them to London to manage the actor Henry Irving's theater, the Lyceum, which really meant managing Henry Irving, and in whatever hours were left he wrote novels that mostly didn't sell. In 1897 one of them was Dracula.
Photographer unknown, Florence Balcombe, c. 1880
It did fine. It was not the cultural event we picture now, not in his lifetime. Bram died in 1912 without much money, and Florence, in her fifties, became a widow whose main asset was the copyright on a vampire. She sold some of his notes and papers. She watched the royalties. Dracula was her pension, and she guarded it exactly like one....
....MUCH MORE
Also at PL, PC, October 6:
A Sheet Thrown Over It
Here is what I can't stop wondering about. Every culture that has ever written anything down has also written down a ghost story, and we are still doing it, still turning off the lights on purpose every October, and I want to know why....
Previous visits to her site:
"The Plague That Broke English (And Why the Founding Fathers Didn’t Sound British)"
