The novel opens with a prologue, in which an unnamed narrator states that he is publishing an account written by the protagonist of Carmilla, whose name we later find to be Laura. This narrator of the prologue says that he or she has received Laura’s account from a Doctor Hesselius, a man known for his “learning and acumen” (5) and who is an expert in a “mysterious subject” that Hesselius describes as “involving […] some of the profoundest arcana of our dual existence” (5). The unnamed prologue narrator claims that he is presenting Laura’s account unedited and in its entirety. Laura, however, is not available as a source of further comment on the content of her account, for she has died at some point between the time she wrote her account and the unnamed prologue narrator’s publishing of said account.

Chapter One opens with Laura describing her circumstances during the time of the events of the novel. She is nineteen and lives in a castle, or “schloss,” in Styria (modern-day southeast Austria and northeast Slovenia) with her father, “the kindest man on earth, but growing old” (7), some servants, and two governesses: good-natured mother figure Madame Perrodon, and the worldlier and “vivacious” Mademoiselle De Lafontaine (50).