Carmen de Burgos, La mujer fría [The Cold Woman] (1922) 1

Carmen de Burgos, like her friend, Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent, was a successful and well-known writer in her lifetime, but largely forgotten during the Franco years and is only slowly emerging from that oblivion. La mujer fría centres on Blanca, the title character, who has an abnormally low body temperature and whose breath smells of death. She is extraordinarily beautiful, though, and extremely wealthy, since she is a widow whose two deceased husbands left her their fortunes. This is one of many stories by de Burgos which took advantage of what Susan Kirkpatrick describes as a “new arena of print culture that took off like wildfire the twentieth century – the highly profitable paperback short novel series pitched both in price and style toward a mass audience”. It seems fair to conclude, then, that de Burgos was an innovator in her use of the vampire figure.