Before that, he's appeared in some hazy dream sequences, but that's about it. Even though his name is in the title, the Count doesn't really enter the narrative until 250+ pages in.
The biggest disappointment for me was the lack of Dracula in the book. It gets depressing after a while is there no decent man left in England? But even outside the walls of the asylum, the male characters are patronizing and cruel. Her detailed descriptions of life in the insane asylums, where many women were sent for 'unnatural lusts' that would be considered quite normal today, and the 'cures' the inmates endure are chilling and horrific. It is here that Essex's research really shines through. They are all contemptuous of women, treating Mina and Lucy quite poorly. Just as the female characters were fairly flat in Stoker's novel, the male characters have been reduced to two-dimensional stereotypes. While the characters and events bear passing resemblance to the story of Dracula, the two stories are night and day. But Mina’s sexual awakening through her erotic dreams and encounters with the Count also awaken her to the power she possesses as a woman, enabling her to step outside of the restrictions of 19 th century England. Mina begins her story as a vision of the ideal Victorian woman: prim, proper, well-spoken and well-mannered.
Now she’s taking on the puritanical Victorians in this revision of Bram Stoker’s classic Dracula. In her previous book, Stealing Athena, Essex wrote about Lady Elgin and Aspasia, two women who faced opposition from the male-dominated societies they lived in. Karen Essex likes to write about strong women.
When Lucy dies after being committed to an insane asylum for nymphomania Mina decides to visit the place herself, seeking answers to the meaning of her dreams and the suspicious circumstances of Lucy’s death. Indeed, the mysterious man in her dreams is beginning to appear in ‘real’ life, too. When she goes to visit her friend Lucy, Mina is also swept up in Lucy’s tangled romances, but the dreams and night wanderings persist. But at night she has vivid, sensual dreams, and on one occasion Mina awoke to find herself wandering London in her nightgown, barely escaping rape. She is a proper Victorian woman, soon to be wed to the equally proper Jonathan Harker. Mina Murray is a teacher at Miss Hadley’s School for Young Ladies of Accomplishment, where she has been ever since she was a young girl, when her parents sent her away because of her strange, unnatural behavior.
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