Authorising the Count: Florence Stoker, Dora May Patrick and the women who shaped Dracula

Presentation abstract

Abstract

The suave, evening-dress Count came from Hamilton Deane’s stage adaptation, premiered at Derby’s Grand Theatre in 1924 and carried into film by Bela Lugosi. The decisions that let it exist, and that shaped what came after, were made by Bram Stoker’s widow. Florence Stoker held the rights to Dracula, and it was her licence that allowed Deane to put it on the stage at all.

This paper reads her as the figure who decided what counted as Dracula. She authorised one line, the Deane stage play that John Balderston revised for Broadway and that became Lugosi’s 1931 film, for which Universal paid her $40,000, and she suppressed another, pursuing Murnau’s unlicensed Nosferatu through the German courts until they ordered the prints destroyed.

For all this, Florence Stoker survives in the record as Bram’s widow and the woman who sued Nosferatu, not as the author of the Dracula the twentieth century received. She edited the posthumous Dracula’s Guest in 1914 and outlived him by a quarter-century on an estate that dwarfed his, yet her shaping hand on the most filmed character in cinema goes uncredited. Beside her stands Dora May Patrick, the premiere’s Mina, Deane’s lifelong partner and, on the project’s reading, a likely co-author of the 1924 adaptation, almost wholly written out.

Drawing on doctoral research into Florence Stoker, the paper treats Dracula as a property whose canonical form was settled by two women’s choices about who could adapt it and on what terms and asks what it means that the record kept the character and lost the women who made it. Representation and appropriation, read here through licence, litigation and authorship, turn out to be questions about whose work the culture agrees to remember.