Robert Aickman: Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal

Aickman’s strange stories are never straightforward, but “Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal” is more so than most.  An anonymous young girl is traveling through Italy with her family in the early 1820s.  Her journal takes a strange turn when she meets a captivating older man – suddenly life (or the lure of its opposite) becomes much more exciting.

Even if it is a more conventional vampire story (how many of Aickman’s other tales contain monsters we can name, or monsters at all?) “Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal” is still replete with Aickmanesque touches, esoteric literary references, and subtle horror made more compelling by the subtlety. Every word counts.  It deservedly won the first World Fantasy Award in 1975.  

Robert Aickman

Using the epistolary format even more effectively than Bram Stoker, Aickman paints a vivid, intimate portrait of the character and her transformation.  The journal-writer is very much in her own head, alienated from the corporeal world, ready to become one of the chosen, the elect, special, forever removed from the “vulgar tiredness of common life”.  Even a chance encounter with Byron and Shelley fails to excite.

The story is not without Aickman ambiguity – is the narrator being empowered or groomed?  Bored, she frets at 19^th century restrictions (“Sometimes I really hate being a girl”, “How I weary of these règles and conventionalities by which I have hitherto been bound!  How I long for the measureless liberty that has been promised me and of which I feel so complete a future assurance!”).  Becoming a vampire nullifies these restrictions and may well do away with règles forever (for more than one meaning of the word).

Blood-soaked sheets and howling wolves indicate the coming metamorphosis, recalling a quote from another vampire story which this one faintly echoes:

“Girls are caterpillars while they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime there are grubs and larvae, don't you see--each with their peculiar propensities, necessities and structure.”

We leave the narrator with more important things on her mind than journal-writing, longing to join her new people, to change into something rich and strange:

“I have never before felt so greatly alive and yet I catch in myself an eerie conviction that my days are now closely numbered.  It does not frighten me, as one would expect it to do.  Indeed, it is very nearly a relief.  I have never moved at my ease in this world…”