The vivid imagery of the scene evokes a sense of wonder and tranquility, but Sheridan’s pairing of adjectives also hint at an underlying sense of isolation and solitude. Gothic conventions of isolation and loneliness are prominent in this passage. Laura describes the location as a ‘very lonely place,’ suggesting that it is cut off from society and that those who venture there are alone and vulnerable. This contrasts the wider theme of familial love in the novel, where the closeness between Carmilla and Laura heightens, creating an ambiguity between maternal love and sexual attraction. The allegory’s created through the use of nature and the environment, such as the bridge that connects the shloss to the wider scope of Styria, insinuates the sense of stream-like infiltration. 

“I have been thinking of it”, she went on, “All the time I have been in hiding from your husband, all the time I lay ill. My thoughts have driven me here.”

“I want to make atonement – I want to undo all I can of the harm I once did”

This passage articulates the relief associated with death and the relationship that the broader novel has with the concept of death and sickness. Although on the surface Anne’s relief is tied to her escape of Percival, broad reflection on the contemporary attitude towards death, and particularly towards the kind of death Anne seems to be inflicted by, the slow, gradual decline of a tubercular death. Anne is one of our consumptive heroines, all but in name. 

Despite the discomfort of dying, Anne is capable of relief, happiness, and contemplation in this period that she has ‘lay ill’, suggesting the gentle languishment of her sickness. This word ‘lay’ articulates the refinement associated with her gradual decline typical of the nineteenth-century perception of illness, rather than a harsh, visceral depiction of the reality.

“Look at me,” she commands of Laura. The state of her health is unquestionably determined by her appearance, suggesting that the external is the best indicator of truth, that appearnace being ‘very sorrowful and very ill’. Laura’s sorrow at her appearance ties her pity of Anne’s illness, and raises a sense of the tragic nature of Anne’s character. 

Collins is writing just after the peak of the epidemic curve of tb, and his text seems to reflect the acceptance of death that came alongside the trauma of excessive death and loss that permeated British society. Perhaps unconsciously, Collin’s presents us with the woman who is not grieved by her own approach to death, because it would ultimately fruitless, but welcomes it with a ‘smile’ , allowing her to move on to a better place, to ‘heaven’. The idealized state of death that resulted from the influx of death in the mid-nineteenth-century is embodied in Anne’s seemingly inevitable decline. From her initial appearance, it feels that she is destined to this fate due to her class, her appearance and importantly, her gender.