Was it difficult to do research for this character? What were some of the most interesting challenges you ran into when trying to uncover the real story? LV: Your version of Bathory is more compassionate and complex then the accounts of her sprinkled all over the Internet. But the more I read, the more I realized the truth was probably somewhere in the middle. She's been Lady Dracula, cackling and wielding her whip, and she's been the poor victim, a powerless woman taken advantage of by the men in her life. And the more I read, the more I realized how little of that contradiction had been explored in literature. And then when I read how she lost two of those longed-for children to the plague, including the heir who would have protected the family name and fortune, I wondered, how could any woman survive such a loss? What would it do to the psyche to lose, and lose, and lose again everything and everyone you loved? As a woman who struggled with infertility for ten years the same way the countess did, I sympathized with her. Yet in many ways her life was entirely recognizable to me.
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