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illogical, the old and the new, the impulsive and the considered, whilst also being thematically engaged in the transgression of boundaries between male and female, human and animal, right and wrong. Simultaneously displaying both irrational flights of imagination and careful research, unconscious impulses and measured ideas, it is Stoker’s most inaccessible yet his most revealing work. Like the man himself,
The Lair of the White Worm
is a complex amalgam of self-possession and passion that defies any ready definition.
    Set in the ancient lands of Mercia, a kingdom dominant in Anglo-Saxon England from the seventh to the ninth centuries which, at its height, stretched from the River Thames to Yorkshire and from Lincolnshire to Wales, as Seed maintains, ‘the action of [
The Lair of the White Worm
] is constantly being displaced from turn-of-the-century England into a legendary past which, Stoker implies, is not anywhere near as remote as we imagined’. 22 Early twentieth-century concerns are framed within a context of historical fact and legendary fable and within the traditional narrative format of a central battle leading to a victorious hero and a displaced villain. As such the heroes and villains of the novel transcend their temporal location and attain a mythic status of universality – ‘the history of the Caswall family is coeval with that of England’ says Sir Nathaniel ( Chapter II ). The moral judgements that are made are therefore simultaneously accorded the weight of universal Truth: and in
The Lair of the White Worm
the strongest moral judgement is that held against women.
    Bram Stoker’s uneasy relationship with the women of his texts has been a matter of considerable debate. In depicting a world of male camaraderie and homosocial salvation, his stories consistently work to demonize the oversexed independent female, whilst praising and advancing the meek womanwho displays deference to her male overlords. In
Dracula
, the ultimately biddable Mina Harker is saved from the vampire’s kiss whilst Lucy Westenra, desirous of three husbands in life, is transformed into a noxious sexual predator in death, finally finding ‘salvation’ through the phallic penetration of a wooden stake through her heart. In
The Man
(1905) the female protagonist Stephen Norman, who has been given a man’s name, recognizes what she regards as the ‘defects’ of her femininity and decides that she will base her life, not on ‘woman’s weakness’ but on ‘man’s strength’. 23 Having taken it upon herself to propose marriage to a man, Stephen is brutally rejected by him, and experiences loneliness and despair, her decline ending happily when she accepts a proposal from the man she herself initially spurned for his assumptions of masculine superiority: ‘She was all woman now; all-patient, and all-submissive. She waited for the man; and the man was coming!’ 24
    Stoker’s penultimate book,
Famous Impostors
(1910), elucidates many of the concerns embedded in his fiction, most conspicuously that of the relationship between the sexes. A curious incursion into cases of historical imposture, the work devotes an entire section to women who disguise themselves as men and another, entitled ‘The Bisley Boy’, to the attestation that Queen Elizabeth I was in fact a man, the original child having died in infancy and been replaced by a male infant. The inference that a successful woman of power must in fact be a man says much for Stoker’s attitude towards the dominant female, whilst the direct relevance of this book’s theme of gender inversion to
The Lair of the White Worm
is demonstrable by the latter’s dedication to Bertha Nicoll, a friend of Stoker’s who first made him aware of the conspiracy theory attached to the young Queen Elizabeth.
    Throughout this collection, the driving force of many of the plots is the instability of women, or the evils that women do. Even scorned female animals are to be treated with the utmost