LJ Smith, Vampire Diaries author whose characters spawned a massive media franchise

Yahoo

28-03-2025

​L J Smith, who has died aged 66, was the author of The Vampire Diaries, a sequence of supernatural romance novels that sold millions of copies and became a long-running television series; her career was nevertheless regarded as something of a cautionary tale.
The Vampire Diaries chronicled the development of a love triangle involving Elena Gilbert, a teenage girl living in a small town in Virginia, and two brothers who belong to the ranks of the undead. The first four volumes were published in the early 1990s: with elements of both horror and romance, an unusual combination in the teen fiction market at the time, they became modest bestsellers.
The author then moved on to other projects. But more than a decade later the phenomenal success of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight novels (2005-08) ushered in a vogue for sexy stories of vampires more toothsome than toothy, and L J Smith's backlist of Vampire Diaries books returned to the bestseller charts.
She resumed the series, after a 17-year-gap, with Nightfall in 2009. In the same year the CW network launched a television version of The Vampire Diaries as a teen-appropriate alternative to HBO's violent and sexually explicit True Blood. It ran for eight years (being shown on ITV2 in the UK) and spawned two popular spin-off series, The Originals and Legacies.
L J Smith reaped limited rewards from the success of her creation, however. When she had been commissioned to write the first Vampire Diaries novels in 1990 she had signed a 'work for hire' contract which entitled her only to a small one-off fee.
Later on the publisher, Alloy Entertainment (now a subsidiary of Warner Brothers), offered her better terms to continue the series, but by stipulation of the original contract it was the publisher not the author who owned the rights to the characters. L J Smith continued to write the series until 2011, then parted ways with Alloy after the company insisted that she recycle storylines from the television show.
The books continued to flow, however, with ghost writers supplying the content but L J Smith still named as the author on the cover. Furious, she told Salt Lake Magazine in 2012 that the ghost writers were serving to 'mutilate [my] child limb by limb and destroy it'. Determined to stand up to Alloy, she went on to stage what the Wall Street Journal described as 'one of the strangest comebacks in literary history'.
Making use of Amazon's copyright-hurdling Kindle Worlds 'fan fiction' service – normally the preserve of obsessive enthusiasts wishing to devise their own stories involving a favourite author's characters – L J Smith reclaimed her creations and self-published three further instalments of the Vampire Diaries. Offered two alternative continuations of the saga, readers warred with each other online as to which should be regarded as canonical.
Lisa Jane Smith was born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on September 4 1958, the daughter of Glenn C Smith, an engineer and entrepreneur, and his wife Kathryn, a teacher. She spent most of her childhood living in 'sad, sunny, superficial southern California'.
She knew that she was going to be a successful writer while still a small girl, when 'a teacher praised a horrible poem I'd written'. After high school she spent some time living with friends of her family in Goring-on-Thames in Oxfordshire, and developed a love of English literature.
Lisa studied English and Experimental Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and was set to do a Masters in the latter discipline but baulked at having to experiment on the brains of monkeys and mice. Instead she secured a Masters in Educational Studies at San Francisco State University, and went on to work as a kindergarten and special needs teacher.
She published two fantasy novels for young adults, The Night of the Solstice (1987) and Heart of Valour (1990); they did not sell well, but brought her to the attention of a book packaging company (subsequently purchased by Alloy Entertainment) which commissioned her to write the first three volumes of The Vampire Diaries in nine months.
L J Smith – who used initials in homage to J R R Tolkien and C S Lewis – wrote several other fantasy novels, including the Secret Circle series, which featured teenage witches and became a television drama in 2011. At the turn of the millennium she abandoned writing for several years to help with her sister's family, her brother-in-law being seriously ill with cancer.
For the final decade of her life Lisa Smith suffered from a debilitating autoimmune disease, but although she spent much of the time confined to hospital she strove to continue with her work and recently completed her first novel for adults, Lullaby.
She is survived by her partner, Julie Divola.
L J Smith, born September 4 1958, died March 8 2025​
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