The Vampyre is the first published prose work by John William Polidori (1795-1821), who was not a writer by profession. He was a medical doctor traveling with Lord Byron as the poet’s personal physician. In the summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, Polidori participated with house guests in a ghost-story writing contest proposed by Byron. The guests included poet Percy Shelley and author Mary Shelley. Polidori told a story about a skull-headed woman who peered through a keyhole, while Mary Shelley penned the beginnings of her seminal novel Frankenstein. Byron’s contribution to the contest was an incomplete vampire story later published as “A Fragment” in 1819.

Polidori used “A Fragment” as the framework for The Vampyre, published the same year as Byron’s fragment. Byron’s tale is narrated in the form of a letter written in 1816 by the younger traveling companion of Augustus Darvell, an enigmatic and emotionally remote man. During their journey east, the narrator observes that Darvell appears to be wasting away. Just before he dies, Darvell makes the narrator swear that he will conceal his friend’s death and perform a ritual involving Darvell’s ornate ring. In the introduction to his novel Ernestus Berchtold, Polidori recalled more about the plot of Byron’s tale than the poet committed to paper: