A forgotten vampire novel is back on shelves.

Originally published in 1897, the same year as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire is now a Penguin Classic. Less known than other early vampire novels like Dracula and Sheridan Le Fanu’s sapphic story Carmilla, Penguin are spotlighting the overlooked Gothic book and celebrating Marryat’s “revolutionary” protagonist, Harriet Brandt, as a “biracial, bisexual, feminist psychic vampire”.

The Blood of the Vampire follows Harriet Brandt, a mixed-race psychic vampire who travels from a Jamaican convent to Europe to integrate into Victorian society. The unique subject matter reflected Marryat’s career. The prolific English author, who penned around 70 books, was overlooked in her own right for her work, in part for her exploration of feminist and other taboo themes.

Like in The Blood of the Vampire, more film and television is reflecting on the connection between vampirism, race, and otherness, from Ryan Coogler’s Sinners to AMC’s Interview with the Vampire adaptation, which makes protagonist Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson) a Black gay man.

It is not a universal reading that Marryat’s protagonist is bisexual, and the novel has drawn criticism for its depictions of racism, although Penguin, alongside other scholars, suggest that this depiction is categorically a “critique”, rather than an endorsement, of such attitudes.