Carmen Maria Machado’s edition of Carmilla alters the text significantly and is an insult to readers

I bought myself a copy of Carmilla by Sheridan le Fanu, edited by Carmen Maria Machado (Lanternfish Press) as a gift for Halloween since I really enjoyed the book when I read it online last year. (It's in the public domain.) I like annotated editions of classics so I looked on Amazon and thought this edition would be great. I could not have been more wrong!

Not only does the Machado cook up her own fanfiction about the "lost" true story behind Carmilla and how le Fanu left out all the explicit sex that appeared in the "original" letters written by the "real" characters (all of this is made up), Machado also alters the actual text of the story! (Not to mention the additional personal fanfiction she weaves in through footnotes on minor characters' backgrounds and love life.) Machado dumbs down the text for readers, replacing lots of words and phrases, altering entire sentence structures and their meanings, etc. in every paragraph all throughout the book to "modernize" the text! It's so much worse than American editors changing some terms and punctuation in the Harry Potter books, for example. Machado gets away with these changes because the original work is in the public domain, but this is a sheer insult to the author and countless readers who just want to read the original. It's not even like le Fanu's language is archaic or old-fashioned like Shakespeare. I get the feeling that Machado's "editing" was nothing but an ego-boosting and attention-grabbing exercise on her part. If she truly wanted to make meaningful contributions, she could have produced an abridged version for young readers, a graphic novel, or something genuinely different, not just unnecessarily butchered the original language to leave her own mark while fooling people into buying the book thinking it's le Fanu's original text. (The cover should have said "Adapted by CMM" rather than "Edited by CMM".)

Here are just a few spoiler-free examples of the innumerable alterations that Machado makes:

• le Fanu's original: In Styria, we, though by no means magnificent people, inhabit a castle, or schloss. 
  • Machado's edit: In Styria, we — though by no means magnificent people — inhabit a manor house. 
• le Fanu's original: It was the figure of a hunchback, with the sharp lean features that generally accompany deformity. He wore a pointed black beard, and he was smiling from ear to ear, showing his white fangs. He was dressed in buff, black, and scarlet…
  • Machado's edit: He was a hunchback, with sharp, lean features. He had a pointed black beard, and he was smiling from ear to ear, showing his white teeth. He was dressed in fawn, black, and scarlet…
• le Fanu's original: I was relieved on hearing the voices of Carmilla and Madame, who were at that moment approaching. The voices died away. In this solitude, having just listened to so strange a story, connected, as it was, with the great and titled dead, whose monuments were moldering among the dust and ivy round us, and every incident of which bore so awfully upon my own mysterious case—in this haunted spot, darkened by the towering foliage that rose on every side, dense and high above its noiseless walls—a horror began to steal over me, and my heart sank as I thought that my friends were, after all, not about to enter and disturb this triste and ominous scene.
  • Machado's edit: Having just listened to so strange a story in this solitude –connected, as it was, with the great and titled dead whose monuments were moldering among the dust and ivy round us — and with every incident that matched my own mysterious case—a horror had begun to steal over me. I heard the voices of Carmilla and Madame, who were at that moment approaching. In this haunted spot, darkened by the towering foliage that rose on every side, dense and high above its noiseless walls, my heart sank as I thought that my friends were about to enter and disturb this sorrowful and ominous scene.

In the last example, note how Machado changes the sentence to mean the opposite of what it's supposed to! In the original, the narrator hears her friends and then thinks that they are not going to enter and break up the ominous scene (and make things happier). But Machado deletes the "not", so her sentence means the narrator actually doesn't want her friends to come and change the scene!

So if you're thinking of buying Carmilla for yourself or a friend and you value honesty and respect, avoid Machado at all costs. For a high-quality, properly edited and annotated edition, check out Carmilla: A Critical Edition edited by Kathleen Costello-Sullivan. (I discovered this good edition after I already bought the terrible Machado edition; I'm wiser now and got a library copy of it to make sure it's the real thing before buying it!)