On 16 June 1897 the artist Philip Burne-Jones wrote to Bram Stoker to thank him for sending him the recently published Dracula, noting that he will read it with interest and promising that as soon as he has ‘a copy I shall beg your acceptance of a photograph of my Vampire, a woman this time, so as to make the balance fair!’ The artist claims to redress the gender imbalance by revealing his vampire to the writer. In Dracula, the vampire Lucy is associated with, though not identified as, Ellen Terry. Although Terry is the only actor mentioned in the text, in twentieth- and twenty-first-century biographical criticism Henry Irving becomes entwined with the figure of the vampire for draining his employee of his creative vitality by imposing onerous administrative duties on him during Stoker's tenure as the Lyceum's acting or business manager. In what has now become the defining relationship between Stoker and Irving, Stoker's relationship with Terry and her centrality to the cultivation of the writer's work has largely been overlooked. Indeed, Terry's association with Lucy has been interpreted as a ‘hostile reference’ to her. Crucially, this tendency to identify the actors with vampires has drained attention from the writer's complex engagement with the Lyceum's supernatural and melodramatic productions and the theatre's role in shaping Stoker's Gothic fiction has, as a consequence, been neglected.