Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor, usually called Betsy Taylor, is the central figure of MaryJanice Davidson’s Undead series and a deliberately comic revision of the vampire protagonist. Her transformation does not make her a remote aristocrat or a creature committed to secrecy. Instead, it places an outspoken modern woman in an unwanted position of authority, where the practical inconveniences of being dead coexist with an unusually stubborn commitment to human and animal life. Betsy’s significance lies in that contradiction: she is a vampire who resists the moral simplifications traditionally attached to vampirism, yet her attempts to remain humane repeatedly expose the danger of acting on instinct.

Identity and Introduction

Betsy’s story begins in Undead and Unwed, when she is hit by a car on her thirtieth birthday and wakes up dead. The event makes her a vampire, but the first consequence she emphasizes is not power or immortality; it is outrage. She did not ask to become Queen of the Vampires, yet the title is thrust upon her before she understands what is happening. Her unwilling elevation establishes the series’ governing irony: a supernatural monarchy acquires a ruler who regards the role less as a destiny than as an intolerable imposition.

Her new condition also produces a catalogue of mundane frustrations. She cannot stay awake during the daytime, and no amount of styling can alter her hair permanently: whatever hairstyle she creates, it has returned to its original form when she wakes the following evening. These details turn vampirism into an intimate bodily inconvenience rather than an exclusively Gothic curse. Betsy’s undeath is frightening in its implications, but it is also irritating, embarrassing, and resistant to the ordinary forms of self-presentation through which she understands herself.

Life as an Undead Queen

Unlike the traditional vampire who depends on a coffin and secrecy, Betsy lives in a mansion with her two best friends and is open with her family about her newly undead state. Her relatives respond to the revelation with varying degrees of acceptance, keeping the supernatural within the sphere of domestic negotiation rather than banishing it to a hidden nocturnal world. The mansion functions less as a crypt than as a social household, and Betsy’s queenship is consequently presented through friendship, family, and personal irritation as much as through supernatural hierarchy.

Her relationship with Eric Sinclair, her “husband,” adds another layer to her unwanted status. Betsy dislikes his attention while remaining capable of engaging with the power and intimacy it represents; she deliberately calls him “Sink-lair” to annoy him. The joke is characteristic of her resistance. Even when a title, a marriage, or a supernatural order is imposed upon her, language remains one of the ways she can reclaim a measure of control.

Ethics and Key Actions

Betsy’s strongest defining trait is her idealistic approach to other humans and animals, a quality that undeath does not erase. When she discovers feral vampires abandoned by her arch-nemesis, those around her urge her to destroy them. Betsy refuses. Instead, she tries to reintegrate the Fiends into society, treating them as beings capable of socialization rather than as monsters whose existence alone justifies extermination. Her method is both compassionate and comic: she teaches one of them to knit and sometimes allows him to drink from her wrist.

The experiment has a devastating consequence. The Fiends kill one of Betsy’s closest friends, but even this loss does not lead her to condemn them outright. She cannot bring herself to blame them because, in her view, they are merely following their natural urges. This response reveals the limit as well as the strength of her morality. Her refusal to reduce the Fiends to evil protects the possibility of coexistence, but it also risks excusing violence and leaves her exposed to the consequences of misjudging dangerous beings.

Betsy is equally uneasy about feeding from humans. Rather than accept indiscriminate predation as an unavoidable fact of vampire existence, she tries to attack only people who somehow deserve their fate. She therefore becomes a one-woman vampire vigilante team, prowling dark alleyways for would-be rapists and murderers while always doing so in heels. The image turns punitive violence into a form of moral self-management: Betsy cannot abandon the vampire appetite, so she attempts to direct it toward targets selected by her own rough justice.

Comic Transformation of Vampire Conventions

Betsy belongs to a broader transformation in vampire fiction in which bloodsucking characters may be good as well as bad and may live openly among humans rather than remain hidden in ancestral castles. Earlier models established the vampire as a nocturnal predator, an elegant or threatening outsider, or a fully developed antagonist whose plans and morals shaped the plot. Betsy retains the fundamental fact of being undead, but she redirects the genre’s attention toward social administration, bodily inconvenience, ethical compromise, and the absurdity of maintaining ordinary ideals after death.

Her characterization also stands in contrast to the carefully refined feeding practices associated with some contemporary vampire communities in fiction and culture. Real vampire subcultures described elsewhere in the book distinguish between fashion-oriented participants and blood drinkers who feed from willing, medically tested donors. Betsy is not defined by such a settled communal code. Her attempts to regulate her own feeding are improvised, personal, and sometimes vigilante in form. That difference makes her morality unstable but dramatically active: she is not simply obeying a rule system, but repeatedly deciding what kind of vampire she is willing to become.

Narrative Role and Significance

Betsy’s plot combines metamorphosis, reluctant ascension, and moral comedy. Death does not complete a tragic descent into monstrosity; it initiates an unwanted promotion and forces her to negotiate the gap between instinct and principle. Her story repeatedly reverses the expected vampire trajectory. The newly dead woman does not retreat into a coffin, conceal herself from her family, or surrender her previous standards. She remains socially visible, emotionally expressive, and concerned with the fate of creatures who may not deserve her trust.

That persistence gives Betsy her distinctive narrative force. She is not a perfect ethical vampire: the Fiends’ violence demonstrates the cost of her idealism, while her selective attacks on criminals show that her solution to predation is still predation. Yet the series treats those contradictions as the substance of her character rather than as flaws to be tidied away. Betsy’s undeath becomes a comic test of whether moral agency can survive bodily transformation, and her answer is neither a simple yes nor a simple no. She keeps choosing, even when every available choice carries blood, danger, or an unwanted crown.