Bram Stoker is a notoriously elusive subject. Despite three biographies and a growing interest in his work, we know very little about him beyond the bare outline of his public career and a few hints and whispers of skeletons in his closet. Stoker's reputation as a "naturally secretive" man is now legendary and has become part of the machinery of speculation that has repeatedly sought to link the sensationalism of his fiction to a no less sensational private life. The intricacies of Stoker's relationship to his sometime friend Oscar Wilde, the rumors of "a sexless marriage," his possible homosexuality, his alleged membership of a secret occult society like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, or the suggestion that his death was caused by syphilis have all been paraded as tantalizing mysteries or perhaps as clues to some other, unimaginably grotesque reality -- the melodrama of secrecy writ large. It is as if the many lives of Dracula, its multitude of readings and retellings, has produced an extended cultural narrative in which the author has become an indispensable character, to be addressed or dismissed at will. "I have read Stoker," sneers the vampire leader in Dan Simmons's Romanian thriller Children of the Night (1992). "I read his silly novel when it was published in 1897 and saw the first stage production in London." And when Stoker appears in Brian W. Aldiss's time-travel vampire novel Dracula Unbound (1991), he fares little better: he is "the ginger man," a red-bearded Irish voluptuary obsessed with menstrual blood who is saved from syphilis by an American visitor from the year 1999.

Yet this penchant for biography and autobiography, and the knowing self that is their reader, is something that we share with Stoker's own age; indeed, this commodified need to know is partly what connects the very different turning points of our two centuries to the same modernity. More specifically, the popular desire for a biographical or autobiographical mode of understanding derives much of its impetus from the increasingly powerful apparatuses of journalism and publicity, occupational and commercial cultures within which Stoker himself moved and worked at a time when these key institutions were beginning to assume their characteristically modern forms. To read Stoker's interviews in The Daily Chronicle with such literary, theatrical, and political luminaries as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir W. S. Gilbert, or Winston Churchill is to see the human interest story in embryo, with its detailed descriptions of the subject's home, revelations of his personal life, and itinerary of his working day. So too, with Stoker's Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving ( 1906), an insider's memoir of his actor-manager employer, a biography that comes as close to autobiography as almost anything the author ever wrote.

Stoker's Personal Reminiscences encourages us to read his own life through that of Henry Irving and as a result the book conceals as much as it reveals. This blurring of biographer and subject returns us to one of the central paradoxes informing Stoker's career, for while he consistently evades the full glare of biographical exposure, his work seems equally consistently to incite it. The disturbing scenarios enacted in his Gothic narratives have inspired a number of attempts to psychoanalyze the author through the text, reading Dracula as a case study in Oedipal rivalry or infantile trauma. In a less clinical vein, it has become a critical commonplace to see in Count Dracula a fictional expression of Stoker's "ambiguous regard" for the dominant and domineering figure of Henry Irving, an interpretation necessarily requiring "an excursion into biography." But, from the other side of the text, Stoker himself constantly invites a biographical reading by playfully scattering topical references and allusions throughout his work. It is possible to find elements of selfportraiture in several of his heroes and the places and people in his novels are not infrequently based on those he knew well. He confirmed, for example, that Dracula's Professor van Helsing was "founded on a real character," though, typically, he gave no clue as to who this was. . .