Yieger's Cabinet. Spiritual Vampirism: The History of Etherial Softdown,: and her friends of the "New Light".

Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co.,, 1853. The first female vampire protagonist First edition of the first vampire novel by an American, and the first anywhere to introduce a female vampire protagonist. The work, written as hatchet job on the social reformer, hydrotherapy advocate, and feminist Mary Gove Nichols (1810-1884), includes deliberately ill-disguised characters; Nichols herself depicted as the predatory protagonist Etherial Softdown, an "oversexed evil vampire" (Cohen, p. 15). Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla, often cited as the first female vampire novel, was not published until 20 years later, in 1872. Nichols is depicted here as an immoral creature who "sank her claws and her mouth into men she had a yen for, and coughed up blood to gain sympathy when it suited her" (ibid., p. 15). Charles Wilkins Webber (1819-1856) was a Kentucky author predominantly known for his western novels. He lived with Nichols, her husband Thomas Nichols, and a group of their left-wing followers in New York from 1846 to 1847. During this stay he attempted to romance Nichols's daughter Elma and was subsequently spurned; Webber then wrote Yieger's Cabinet in the spirit of revenge. The contentious book "became the talk of the water-cure circuit; allegedly a copy circulated among insiders with the fictionalized characters' named decoded in the margins" (ibid., p. 15). This work relies on Nichols's scandalous reputation as a free love radical and is one among many pieces of literature, often published in New York's "flash press" of satirical weekly newspapers, that intended to undermine and ridicule her belief in a "women's 'right of self-ownership'" (ibid., p. 6). Members of the women's rights movement who were previously on close terms with Nichols, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, distanced themselves from her for fear of tarnishing their own reputations with that which was being woven around Nichols. She "protested in print that while she had not read [Spiritual Vampirism], her husband had, and told her she should not read it. Whether or not she did, it seems likely that Webber's bloody hatchet job forced her to take control of her own life story", and in response she began writing a semi-fictionalised account of her life in the autumn of 1853 (ibid. p. 15). It was first serialised in her and Thomas's Nichols' Journal from January 1854 and was published under the title Mary Lyndon in 1855. Webber appears fleetingly in Nichols's book "as a pathetic, broken, unstable young man with a very serious alcohol problem" (ibid., p. 15). Octavo in sixes. Original purple pebble-grain cloth, titles to spine in gilt, publisher's vignette within decorative frame to covers in blind, pale brown endpapers. Ten-page publisher's catalogue at end. Front free endpaper sometime neatly excised. Ownership stamp of Annette Cernescu (1938-2001) of San Francisco on first blank. Spine faded and cloth soiled, wear to edges, slight loss of cloth to spine ends, cloth split at centre of rear joint, foxing throughout, remaining a very good copy of a poorly produced book. Patricia Cline Cohen, "The "Anti-Marriage Theory" of Thomas and Mary Gove Nichols: A Radical Critique of Monogamy in the 1850s", Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 34, No. 1, 2014.