Florence Anne Lemon Balcombe Stoker lived at the meeting point of family life, the theatre and literary history. After Bram’s death, she managed the publication and adaptation of his work, whose influence was still growing.
Florence’s early life
Florence Anne Lemon Balcombe was born on 17 July 1858 in Falmouth, Cornwall. Her father, a retired lieutenant-colonel, had served in the Crimea, and some say she was named after Florence Nightingale. The family later lived at 1 Marino Crescent, Clontarf, the same Dublin crescent where Bram had been born at No. 15. Liz Evers’s Dictionary of Irish Biography entry supplies biographical references, including the Stoker Family Papers.
Before her marriage, Florence was courted by Oscar Wilde. The connection places both families within the overlapping cultural world of Dublin, and eventually London. Wilde met Florence at her family’s home in Marino Crescent and was taken with her at once. But Oscar was then studying at Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1874 to 1878, while Florence lived in Dublin, so they saw relatively little of each other during their courtship.
On 6 August 1876 Wilde wrote to his friend Reginald Harding: “I am just going out to bring an exquisitely pretty girl to afternoon service in the Cathedral. She is just seventeen with the most perfectly beautiful face I ever saw and not a sixpence of money.” He does not name her, but the girl is usually identified by biographers as Florence.
Florence had in fact just turned eighteen.
Florence Stoker, sketch attributed to Oscar Wilde.Courtesy of the Bram Stoker Estate.
A landscape for Florrie
In September 1876, Florence received a watercolour landscape from Wilde. Known as View from Moytura House, it shows a view across Lough Corrib from the Wilde family’s summer home near Cong, County Mayo. Its dedication to “Florrie” preserves a personal trace of their courtship.
Oscar Wilde, View from Moytura House, inscribed for Florrie, September 1876.Courtesy of the Bram Stoker Estate.
A pencil portrait by Frank Miles
The painter Frank Miles (1852–1891) was one of Wilde’s closest friends, and the two travelled to the west of Ireland together in the summer of 1876. Miles, a Victorian society portraitist known for his portraits of women, also drew Florence. Preserved in the Estate collection, the drawing is signed “Frank Miles”; its date has not been established.
Florence Stoker, pencil sketch by Frank Miles; date unknown.Courtesy of the Bram Stoker Estate.
“The man you are going to marry”
At Christmas 1876 Wilde had given Florence a small gold cross engraved with his name, a gift often seen as a prelude to an engagement.
By the autumn of 1878 Florence, then 20, was engaged to Bram, who was 30. On 3 October 1878, two months before the wedding, Wilde, then 23, wrote from his family home at 1 Merrion Square. Florence had asked to see him, and he replied that the only proper place was her mother’s house:
Dear Florence,
As you expressed a wish to see me I thought that your mother’s house would be the only suitable place, and that we should part where we first met. As for my calling at Harcourt Street, you know, my dear Florence, that such a thing is quite out of the question; it would have been unfair to you, and me, and to the man you are going to marry, had we met anywhere else but under your mother’s roof, and with your mother’s sanction. I am sure that you will see this yourself on reflection; as a man of honour I could not have met you except with the full sanction of your parents and in their house.
As regards the cross, there is nothing ‘exceptional’ in the trinket except the fact of my name being on it, which of course would have prevented you from wearing it ever, and I am not foolish enough to imagine that you care now for any memento of me. It would have been impossible for you to keep it.
Florence’s reply had implied that Wilde wanted to meet her in secret. He was hurt, telling her she knew him very little.
Wilde asked for the cross back, saying he would keep it as a memento of “two sweet years – the sweetest of all the years of my youth”. Whether Florence returned it, and where it is today, is not known.
Wilde said the loss hurt him deeply, though he could also turn it into an epigram. To a young friend who came to him for advice about an affair, he said:
“It is much better to have loved and lost than to have loved and won.
There is one thing infinitely more pathetic than to have lost the woman one is in love with, and that is to have won her and found out how shallow she is.”
Silentium Amoris
In 1881 Wilde published his first collection, Poems. It includes “Silentium Amoris” (“The Silence of Love”), which has been read as a farewell to Florence. In it a lover, struck dumb by the strength of his feeling, lets his beloved go to “some lips of sweeter melody”:
As oftentimes the too resplendent sun Hurries the pallid and reluctant moon Back to her sombre cave, ere she hath won A single ballad from the nightingale, So doth thy Beauty make my lips to fail, And all my sweetest singing out of tune.
And as at dawn across the level mead On wings impetuous some wind will come, And with its too harsh kisses break the reed Which was its only instrument of song, So my too stormy passions work me wrong, And for excess of Love my Love is dumb.
But surely unto Thee mine eyes did show Why I am silent, and my lute unstrung; Else it were better we should part, and go, Thou to some lips of sweeter melody, And I to nurse the barren memory Of unkissed kisses, and songs never sung.
Oscar Wilde, “Silentium Amoris”, Poems (London: David Bogue, 1881).
Marriage to Bram
Florence married Bram at St Ann’s Church, Dawson Street, Dublin, on 4 December 1878.
Marriage certificate for Bram Stoker and Florence Balcombe, St Ann’s, Dublin.Courtesy of the Stoker Family Papers at Trinity College Dublin, 11076/4/16.
Within days the couple moved to London, where Bram began his work with Henry Irving. Their only child, Irving Noel Thornley Stoker, was born on 30 December 1879, with Irving as his godfather.
Florence Stoker with her son Noel.Courtesy of the Bram Stoker Estate.
London and the theatre
Florence made her own debut at the Lyceum. She took a small part as one of the vestal virgins in Tennyson’s The Cup, which opened in January 1881, alongside Ellen Terry and Henry Irving.
Wilde, perhaps still unable to let her go, sent Terry two crowns of flowers and asked her to pass one to Florence without saying who had sent it:
“I should like to think that she was wearing something of mine the first night she comes on the stage, that anything of mine should touch her. Of course if you think – but you won’t think she will suspect? How could she? She thinks I never loved her, thinks I forget. My God how could I!”
The Stokers’ London life was shaped by the demands of the Lyceum, but Florence also developed friendships and interests of her own. A family account describes her taking part in charitable theatrical performances and entertaining writers, artists and theatre people at home. Her sister-in-law Matilda lived with the couple for a time.
Florence Stoker, drawing attributed to Edward Burne-Jones, around 1888.Courtesy of the Bram Stoker Estate.
Florence was widely admired as a beauty. Sir John Millais reportedly thought her better-looking than Mrs Beerbohm Tree, and George du Maurier counted her among the three most beautiful women he had ever seen. In 1895 Bram commissioned a portrait of her from the Dublin painter Walter Osborne, a family friend. It was shown at the Royal Academy that year, where The Times singled it out for praise. See the contemporary records below.
Florence Stoker, portrait by Walter Osborne, exhibited at the Royal Academy, 1895.Courtesy of the Bram Stoker Estate.
Bram’s last years
After Bram’s strokes, Florence nursed him through his final illness until his death on 20 April 1912. His close friend Hall Caine wrote that if Bram’s was the genius of friendship, hers must have been the genius of love.
Bram’s last years were financially difficult. Ill after his strokes, he wrote to the Royal Literary Fund on 25 February 1911, explaining that he did not know whether he could “in the future do much, or any literary work”; the Fund granted him £100. After his death Florence developed his work, and Dracula above all, into a lasting source of income. Read about the application.
In 1914 Florence published Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories. Her introduction described the title story as an episode removed from Dracula. Scholars have debated its exact relationship to the novel; it is best read both as a story in its own right and as part of the history of Bram’s writing.
Nosferatu and the stage
F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) adapted Dracula without authorisation, changing names and moving the English action to Germany. Florence successfully pursued the production company for copyright infringement, and prints were ordered destroyed. Copies survived, allowing the film to become a landmark of silent cinema.
Florence licensed Hamilton Deane’s stage adaptation, first performed at Derby’s Grand Theatre on 15 May 1924. See the Derby premiere research.
Revised by the American writer John L. Balderston, the play reached Broadway in October 1927 with Bela Lugosi, and the Deane–Balderston version was the basis of the 1931 Universal film.
Florence’s long campaign against Nosferatu is told in Florence Stoker and Nosferatu. In 1930 Universal Pictures bought the rights to the novel and the stage play from their respective rights holders. In 1933 MGM optioned “Dracula’s Guest”; those rights subsequently passed to Universal and led to Dracula’s Daughter (1936). See Licensing the Count.
Florence died on 25 May 1937 at Kinnerton Studios, Knightsbridge, and was cremated quietly at Golders Green, where Bram’s ashes rest.
Contemporary records
Florence, Bram and Noel in Punch
We can maybe learn a little about the family relationship from a Punch cartoon “A Filial Reproof”, published in Punch on 11 September 1886, p. 126. Bram and Florence’s family identifies the figures as Florence, Bram and their son Noel. The Punch editor at the time was Francis Cowley Burnand, whom Bram knew well. The family’s copy is shown here.
Mamma: “Hush, Noel! Haven’t I told you often that little boys should be seen and not heard?” Noel: “Yes, Mamma! But you don’t look at me!”“A Filial Reproof” preserved by the Stoker family.Courtesy of the Bram Stoker Estate
A bit confused
Australian Town and Country · 26 January 1889
An 1889 newspaper tells a dinner-party story about the painter Sir John Millais. He greeted Mrs Beerbohm Tree as Mrs Bernhard Beere, then tried again with Florence Stoker’s name. When she corrected him, he confided to the man beside him that he thought Florence the better-looking of the two. His neighbour turned out to be Mrs Beerbohm Tree’s husband.
Sir John J. Millais, the artist is a man who; though young in years and still very fit for his special life work, has become somewhat dull in his perceptive senses, and is apt to be a bit confused, about names and faces. The other night at a Sunday, dinner party, while the ladies were trooping out of the room, Sir John, addressing one of them who was passing, said, “How do you do, Mrs. Bernhard Beere?” “I’m not Mrs. Bernhard Beere,” replied the lady tartly. “O, to be sure; how stupid I am!” How do you do, Mrs. Bram Stoker?” (The wife of Henry Irving’s manager.) “I’m not Mrs. Bram Stoker; I’m Mrs. Beerbohm Tree,” shouted the lady, still more snappishly. “O yes, of course. How do you do Mrs. Beerbohm Tree?”
And then the ladies passed out; and Sir John, turning to his next male neighbor, remarked, “Well, I’m sure she needn’t have been so angry with me for mistaking her for Mrs. Bram Stoker, Mrs. Bram Stoker is a better looking woman any day than Mrs. Beerbohm Tree.” “Of that,” replied his neighbor, with a bow, I can be no judge, for I am Mr. Beerbohm Tree.
Walter Osborne’s portrait of Florence
The Times (London), “The Academy” · 4 May 1895
In a lengthy article on the 127th exhibition of the Royal Academy, comments on portraits include this description of Walter Osborne’s painting of Florence Stoker, which was commissioned by Bram.
....“Mrs. Bram Stoker” by Mr. Walter Osborne, who has til now been known for his very clever little paintings, in oil and water colour, of Irish street scenes. To many eyes this portrait will seem to have failed because the flesh tints are somewhat dull and gray, and it may be conceded that this is a fault which will be ruinous if not cured; but in all other respects the picture reveals such power of composition and painting, and is so instinct with grace of line, as to distinguish itself from almost any other work of the year. There are three of four other white satin dresses on the walls of this room; one has only to look at them to see how fine is the quality of Mr. Osborne’s painting.
A Dublin friend of the Stoker family, Walter Osborne painted portraits of many members of the Stoker family.
Florence at the Argonauts Club
The Literary World · 19 October 1897
The Argonauts, as a literary club formed last year with its headquarters in Bondstreet, is called, have instituted ‘Private View Teas,’ which are held on Saturday afternoons, for the convenience of visitors to picture galleries or theatres. Among those present at the first of these functions were:
Mr. and Mrs. Humphry Ward, ‘Helen Mathers,’ ‘Iota,’ Mrs. Alice Meynell, Miss Violet Hunt, Mrs. Bram Stoker, Mr. Trevor Battye, Sir A. Blomfield, Miss Arabella Kenealy, and others.
Hall Caine on Florence’s devotion
Sir Thomas Hall Caine, “Bram Stoker: The Story of a Great Friendship”
Excerpt from the obituary of Bram written by his close friend, the best-selling novelist, Sir Thomas Hall Caine, entitled “Bram Stoker: The Story of a Great Friendship”, which speaks of Florence’s love for Bram.
Of the devotion of his wife during these last dark days, in which the whirlwind of his spirit had nothing lost to it but the broken wreck of a strong man, I cannot trust myself to speak. That must always be a sacred memory to those who knew what it was. If his was the genius of friendship, hers must have been the genius of love.
George du Maurier remembers Florence
The Times · 6 March 1934 · E. V. Lucas
An excerpt from “The Creator of Trilby: A Note on George du Maurier”, “Days from a Diary”, published on the hundredth anniversary of du Maurier’s birth.
.......It was on the death of (John) Leech, in 1864, that du Maurier joined the Punch Table, the suggestion being that he should not worry about being funny but rather should lay emphasis on what was beautiful: a piece of counsel that must have done much to encourage and rejoice the new recruit, for if ever a man worshipped beauty it was he. Not only did he worship it, but he created it. The remark that, by his celebration in Punch of tall and graceful types, du Maurier added 2in. to the height of English woman has often been made; and, such is the imitative adaptability of women, it is probably true.
To Bernard Partridge he once said that the three most beautiful women he had seen were Mrs. Stillman, Mrs. John Hare, and Mrs. Bram Stoker.
Florence’s death notice
The Times · 26 May 1937
Stoker- On May 25, 1937, at Kinnerton Studios,
Knightsbridge, Florence Anne Lemon, widow of Bram Stoker. The cremation will take place very quietly at Golders Green tomorrow (Thursday) at 10 o’clock.
Please accept this as the only intimation.
Sources
Oscar Wilde’s letters are quoted from Davis Coakley, Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Irish (Dublin: Town House, 1994), foreword by Merlin Holland, Oscar’s grandson. Biographical details are from Liz Evers’s Dictionary of Irish Biography entry. Details of Florence’s Lyceum debut and Wilde’s flowers are from Infinite Women. Dates of Wilde’s letters to Reginald Harding and Florence are from the Cove Collective edition of Wilde’s personal writing. The gift of the gold cross is described by the Women’s Museum of Ireland.
Read Biography for the family’s shared chronology, and Family objects for approved portraits, inscriptions and personal belongings. Archives lists repositories holding Florence’s correspondence and material relating to the stage play.
