Bram Stoker’s The Lady of the Shroud and the Bosnia Crisis (1908–09)

Abstract

That the politics of the Near East were of singular importance to Stoker can be demonstrated by the fact that he published a second novel on a Balkan theme in 1909, The Lady of the Shroud, in which he went to extraordinary lengths to create the trappings and history of an entirely fictitious Balkan nation state between Greece, Albania, Serbia and Bulgaria, in the mode of Anthony Hope’s Ruritania, or even Hope’s later novel, Sophy of Kravonia (1906). In Stoker’s new novel, a young Englishman, having inherited a huge fortune and a palace in the small Balkan kingdom the ‘Land of the Blue Mountains’, and having married a local vampire (who is really a princess in disguise), sets about modernising the country and preparing for a wider Balkan federation. David Glover has argued that it represents an attempt to create a Utopian Kingdom in keeping with both Liberal ideas of the nation state and British imperial designs,¹ however, the novel is more directly a response to certain recent events that again betray Stoker’s conservative take on the Eastern Question and desire to justify the Berlin treaty, although from the vantage point of a changed political scene during the Bosnia Crisis, when Austria-Hungary was seen as a threat to British imperial interest.