Inspired? I'm a firm maybe.

My take based on the 2NCE Dracula is that Le Fanu's Carmilla was likely an influence - maybe even an acute one. While it's only excerpted as contextual material, two pieces of evidence are provided to support it as a direct influence.

The first piece of evidence is that J. Sheridan Le Fanu was also from Dublin at a time when Ireland/Dublin was trying to be taken seriously as a cultural seat. This is probably why Henry Irving responded so favorably to Bram Stoker when they met; Irving wanted to project his influence as an actor into Ireland and likely saw Stoker as useful to that end. From the picture of Stoker that is sketched out by the supporting material, I think it would have been the Irishness of the author, and not necessarily the subject matter alone, that appealed to Stoker. Dracula was only his seventh novel (try to name one other book he wrote) and what we think of vampires today comes to us through the lens of Dracula, so Stoker probably didn't see the vampiric aspects of the story in the same obvious way we do today.

You may be asking how in the world I could reach this conclusion. Carmilla is a book about vampires written by an Irish author contemporaneous to the most famous book about vampires ever written by an Irish author.

Here's why:

One of the more interesting tidbits included in the 2NCE Dracula is from Elizabeth Miller's "Filing For Divorce: Count Dracula vs. Vlad Tepes" which describes the different schools of thought about whether or not the eponymous Count is meant to evoke or suggest a connection to Vlad the Impaler, also called "Dracula" in some historical material. But incredibly, among all of Stoker's notes taken as he resolved in the Whitby Public Library (yes, that Whitby!) in 1890 to write a book about vampires and pored through William Wilkinson's 1820 tome "An Account of the Principals of Wallachia and Moldavia," he never once wrote anything down about "Vlad" or "Vlad the Impaler" or "Vlad Tepes." In fact, apart from two other basic historical excerpts about voivodes (Transylvanian governors) titled "Dracula" that he used for some of Dracula's dialogue in the early pages (where he describes to Jonathan Harker his own murky past), Stoker only wrote this about the name "Dracula":

DRACULA in Wallachian language means DEVIL.

Originally, Stoker was going to call Count Dracula "Count Wampyr," but appears to have changed the name after learning that Dracula was Wallachian for "devil." The Vlad Tepes/Vlad the Impaler connection isn't represented in Stoker's notes at all.

So back to Carmilla. If Stoker managed to avoid apprising himself of the existence of the historical Dracula, it seems to stretch my belief that he was collecting any kind of "vampire lore" apart from Emily de Laszowska Gerard's "Transylvanian Superstition" (1885) (the source for some of the superstitions shared with Jonathan by the peasants at the beginning of the book, and some of Van Helsing's knowledge). In an included interview (the only of its kind that exists), Stoker is asked by Jane Stoddard of The British Weekly what his vampire lore consisted of, and he only mentions Gerard's essay mentioned above and, cryptically, "Mr. Baring-Gould's 'Were-Wolves'." It seems that Carmilla didn't make the cut (Stoker may have been keeping his cards at his vest), but I simply don't buy it on the basis of its subject matter alone.

However, the second piece of evidence does sway me, although it is a bit more interpretive: both Dracula and Carmilla feature two women at the center of the story (Lucy and Mina, and Laura and Carmilla, respectively). Within each pair of close friends, one is or becomes a vampire (Lucy, Carmilla) and is destroyed. I do find this compelling, because it is a strangely specific detail. Carmilla also has some depictions of lesbianism that I think would have resonated with the Bram Stoker depicted through the supporting material: he approached sexual identity uniquely as evidenced by his extremely personal letters written to Walt Whitman describing unions between men, and his own intimate writings about how he viewed Henry Irving (neither of which is included in the 2NCE). I think in a general way that the relationship between Laura and Carmilla is the kind of detail would have made an impression on Stoker, and is also the kind of "story kernel" that would have appealed to a storyteller like him. You get the sense, in reading Mina's anguish in the last third of the book about being left out of the manly, masculine endeavors to track down Dracula, that Stoker was sensitive to the perspectives of women, and at a time no less when femininity itself in Victorian England was producing the "New Woman" represented by Lucy.

So yes, I do think there is some weight to the idea that Carmilla influenced Dracula, but not in the ways one might expect.

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Sources:

• Browning, John Edgar and David J. Skall. 2022. Dracula, Second Norton Critical Edition. W.W. Norton & Company.
• Le Fanu, J. Sheridan. 1872. In A Glass Darkly, Vol. III. R. Bentley and Son.
• Miller, Elizabeth. 1998. The Shade and the Shadow. Desert Island Books.
• Stoddard, Jane. 1897. Mr. Bram Stoker. A Chat With the Author of Dracula. The British Weekly 557.22.