WEBBER, Charles Wilkins.

£2,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Yieger's Cabinet. Spiritual Vampirism: The History of Etherial Softdown, First edition of the first vampire novel by an American, and the first anywhere to introduce a female vampire protagonist. The work, written as hatchet job on the social reformer, hydrotherapy advocate, and feminist Mary Gove Nichols (1810-1884), includes deliberately ill-disguised characters; Nichols herself depicted as the predatory protagonist Etherial Softdown, an "oversexed evil vampire" (Cohen, p. 15).Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla, often cited as the first female vampire novel, was not published until 20 years later, in 1872. Nichols is depicted here as an immoral creature who "sank her claws and her mouth into men she had a yen for, and coughed up blood to gain sympathy when it suited her" (ibid., p. 15). Charles Wilkins Webber (1819-1856) was a Kentucky author predominantly known for his western novels. He lived with Nichols, her husband Thomas Nichols, and a group of their left-wing followers in New York from 1846 to 1847. During this stay he attempted to romance Nichols's daughter Elma and was subsequently spurned; Webber then wrote Yieger's Cabinet in the spirit of revenge. The contentious book "became the talk of the water-cure circuit; allegedly a copy circulated among insiders with the fictionalized characters' named decoded in the margins" (ibid., p. 15).This work relies on Nichols's scandalous reputation as a free love radical and is one among many pieces of literature, often published in N

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