English · Intermediate
Read Carmilla in Englishwith every sentence explained
J. Sheridan Le Fanu · 1872
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu was first published in 1872. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked intermediate and filed under horror and romance. It runs to about 27,900 words.
A lonely castle. A beautiful guest. A friendship that feels more and more like a hunger.
Laura lives with her father in an old, isolated castle in the forests of Styria, in Central Europe. Life is quiet and lonely, until one summer night a carriage crashes near their gates. Inside is a mysterious young woman who is too weak to travel, and her mother asks if she can stay with them for a while.
Her name is Carmilla. She is beautiful, languid and strangely affectionate, and Laura is delighted to have a friend at last. But Carmilla sleeps until the afternoon, will not say where she comes from, and turns pale at the sound of a hymn. And as the two girls grow closer, young women in the nearby villages begin to fall ill and die.
Written by the Irish author Sheridan Le Fanu in 1872, a quarter-century before Dracula, this short, haunting novella is one of the founding vampire stories.
- Author
- J. Sheridan Le Fanu
- First published
- 1872
- Language
- English
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Horror, Romance
- Length
- About 27,900 words
How it opens
Upon a paper attached to the Narrative which follows, Doctor Hesselius has written a rather elaborate note, which he accompanies with a reference to his Essay on the strange subject which the MS. illuminates.
This mysterious subject he treats, in that Essay, with his usual learning and acumen, and with remarkable directness and condensation. It will form but one volume of the series of that extraordinary man’s collected papers.
Reading Carmilla in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in English. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked intermediate: comfortable once everyday English feels familiar, with the harder sentences one tap away. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
