‘Bram Stoker is commemorated in the best way, by being read.’

Smart, funny, strongly independent, Terry was truly a remarkable artist, the highest paid woman in the England of her era. She would be the only real life person Stoker mentioned in Dracula. In my own forthcoming novel, Shadowplay, she recollects her life and loves, the epic First Nights, the magnificent performances, the reserved but charming Dublin friend who used to advise her on her costumes and would turn out to be a genius of literature.

Dracula, on its appearance, was only a modest success. Henry Irving, on whose personality the central character may be based, always hated it and thought it worthless. But in the years following Stoker’s death, it was discovered by the movies. Since then, this truly great book has never been out of print. Translated into dozens of languages, it has sold millions of copies, the most commercially successful Irish novel in publishing history. And it is indeed an Irish novel, shot through with Stoker’s memories of the childhood tales of spooks he heard from his mother, not a million miles from my grandmother’s. It is also, of course, a great novel of England. We forget how very little of it is set in Eastern Europe, a place Bram Stoker never visited.

Modern-day vampires appear in many forms, in teenage TV dramas, in novels, in cartoons. But they all share one ancestor, the most lasting fictional character ever created by a Dublin author. These days, vampires are not all evil. Some have become compassionate and complex. But that hungering for love was at the heart of Dracula from the beginning, in the closeness forged between two men who were as utterly different from one another as night from day, and in their longing for the same spellbinding but elusive woman. All these decades after its appearance, Dracula is more fascinating than ever. Not only for the drama of its creation, and the skill of its art, but for the deeply moving human story that haunts its every shadow.

Some great writers are celebrated by placing their portraits on stamps, by statues of them in the streets of Irish cities. Stoker, a sometimes uncelebrated figure in his native land, is commemorated in the best way, by being read. But it would be wonderful if his country marked his extraordinary achievement a little more. For a small city in a small country to have been home to so many literary greats is remarkable. But Stoker, unlike Yeats and Wilde, was not a self-promoter. He shared with John Synge, hero of my earlier novel Ghost Light, a wise suspicion of the limelight, a deeply admirable modesty, an insistence on personal privacy. Indeed, Stoker’s autobiography is a truly remarkable book in that it carefully reveals almost nothing of his personality. The snobbery that is sometimes part of literary life may have been another factor against him. Then, as now, there were one or two critics who saw popularity as a sign of mediocrity in a writer’s work, when it is often, in fact, a sign of excellence. His homeland shouldn’t forget the amazing things he did. When the summer comes around and the evenings grow longer, you can sense him, still roaming the Dublin coastline he loved, revealing through fable the strange truths he sensed in the roar of the sea and the gulls.