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Dracula

------The following is quoted from http://www.sparknotes.com/guides/dracula/




Summary And Analysis

"A young English lawyer, Jonathan Harker, travels to Castle Dracula in the Eastern European country of Transylvania to conclude a real estate transaction with a nobleman named Count Dracula. Along the way, the local people warn him about his destination, offering him crucifixes and charms against evil. He meets the Count's coach in the Borgo Pass, and after a harrowing journey, arrives at the crumbling old castle, where he is welcomed by Dracula, an elderly, well-educated man who seems hospitable. However, Harker soon realizes that he is a prisoner, and that the Count is a supernatural being who plans to leave him to die at the hands of three female, blood-sucking creatures. As Dracula departs for England, Harker ends his diary by planning to climb down the castle walls.

In England, Harker's fiancee, Mina Murray, corresponds with her friend Lucy Westenra, who has been proposed to by three men--Dr. John Seward, Arthur Holmwood, and an American named Quincey Morris. Lucy becomes engaged to Holmwood, and Mina comes to visit her at the seaside town of Whitby. There, a strange ship crashes ashore with all its crew missing and its captain dead; it carries fifty boxes of earth from Castle Dracula and a large dog that springs ashore and disappears. Meanwhile, Lucy has taken up sleepwalking, and one night Mina finds her friend out in a cemetery and thinks she sees a dark form with red eyes bending over her. Lucy becomes pale and ill, and has two tiny red marks at her throat; Dr. Seward is unable to diagnose the cause of her illness.

Jonathan Harker reappears in the city of Buda-Pest, suffering from brain fever, and Mina goes to join him. Dr. Seward consults his old teacher, Professor Van Helsing, who covers Lucy's chambers with garlic--a charm against vampires. For a time this works, but eventually Seward and Van Helsing let down their guard and Dracula uses an escaped wolf to break into the Westenra house, giving Lucy's mother a heart attack, scattering the garlic, and enabling the Count to feed. Lucy wastes away and dies at the same time as her fiancee's father, Lord Godalming; Arthur Holmwood is grief-stricken by the loss of those close to him. After Lucy's death, Van Helsing leads Holmwood, Seward, and Quincey Morris to her tomb, where they discover that she has become un-dead--a vampire. To kill the creature, they plunge a stake through her heart, cut off her head, and stuff her mouth with garlic, pledging next to destroy Dracula himself.

Mina and Jonathan, now married, return to England and join forces with the others. They seek to track down the boxes of earth, which are Dracula's places of sanctuary during daylight. However, a patient at Seward's asylum, Renfield, lets the vampire in and he feeds on Mina. As she begins the slow change into a vampire, they destroy most of the boxes and Dracula takes a ship and flees back to his native land. They pursue him, and Van Helsing takes Mina with him and cleanses Castle Dracula using communion wafers and holy water. The others catch up with the Count just as he is about to reach his castle, and Jonathan and Quincey, who is mortally wounded, use silver knives to kill him just as the sun sets. "(http://www.sparknotes.com/guides/dracula/)

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