I think that same dissatisfaction may have been the impetus for Essex's reimagining of the tale, at least in part. I was thirteen, and I devoured it, but in some ways, it left me unsatisfied. It's been a long, long while since I read Dracula. Because for Mina, the story begins long before Jonathan travels to the continent to do business with a Count. There is so much more to Mina's story, things her husband and the doctors and lovers who have spun the story so far have no idea about. But thinking, feeling, intelligent Mina isn't having it. True to their Victorian beliefs and morés, the men have cast the women of the story as either saints of harridans, relegating them to sidelines to seethe or swoon as they may. No, it is a sort of feminist retelling in which Mina asserts that the story that everyone knows, the story that's been told by men, is false. The result is a scintillating gothic novel that reinvents the tragic heroine Mina as a modern woman tortured by desire.ĭracula in Love isn't just a fill-in-the-gaps retelling of Dracula, fleshing out the story from Mina's point of view. What she has to say is more sensual, more devious, and more enthralling than ever imagined. Now, for the first time, Dracula’s eternal muse reveals all. Mina’s version of this timeless gothic vampire tale is a visceral journey into the dimly lit bedrooms, mist-filled cemeteries, and locked asylum chambers where she led a secret life, far from the chaste and polite lifestyle the defenders of her purity, and even her fiancé, Jonathan Harker, expected of her.īram Stoker’s classic novel was only one side of the story.
From the shadowy banks of the River Thames to the wild and windswept coast of Yorkshire, the quintessential Victorian virgin Mina Murray vividly recounts in the pages of her private diary the intimate details of what transpired between her and Count Dracula-the joys and terrors of a passionate affair and her rebellion against a force of evil that has pursued her through time.
0 kommentar(er)
