Geneviève Dieudonné

Geneviève Dieudonné is a fictional character appearing in a number of works by Kim Newman.
Overview
According to Newman, there are three versions of Geneviève, one for each series (Warhammer Fantasy, Anno Dracula, and the Diogenes Club series). Each has a different middle name but each is a "trans-continual cousin". All of them share a number of similar features, however: she is a beautiful blonde female vampire from Brittany (or its otherworldly equivalent), turned by the vampire elder Chandagnac when she was 16. Although she is around 400 years old by the time the stories with her are set, she still resembles a 16-year-old girl. According to Newman, her first name comes from a woman he once knew, while her last name comes from Albert Dieudonné.
Variants
Warhammer Fantasy
Genevieve Sandrine du Pointe du Lac Dieudonné originally appeared in the 1989 Warhammer Fantasy novel Drachenfels, written under Newman's pen name Jack Yeovil. She later appeared in the novel Beasts in Velvet, several short stories collected in Genevieve Undead and Silver Nails, and the complete collection, The Vampire Genevieve. According to Newman, "the reason she doesn't have an accent on her name in GW books is that word-processing/printing techniques were so primitive back then that putting in accents was a major pain and used only on special occasions, like when listing her last name, Dieudonné."
Newman has stated that Geneviève is one of the most popular characters of Warhammer Fantasy and that "a lot of girls were taken with Geneviève as an unusual, non-princessy identification figure (all the Jack Yeovil books have action heroines with Marvel Comics-style 'problems' beyond beating up the next bad guy)."
Her fictional background is gradually revealed throughout the series. She was born in 1416 Brittany. Her father was a doctor, and she learned much from his trade. Disguised as a boy, she fought for Joan of Arc, during the Hundred Years' War; in 1432, after her death, she was given the Dark Kiss by Chandagnac. In the following years, she had a variety of occupations, including nurse, courtesan, slave, and soldier, once more disguising herself as a male to fight under both Francis Drake against the Spanish Armada and Napoleon during the French invasion of Russia. However, she returns as a main character in the third book in the series, Dracula Cha Cha Cha, where in 1959 she has to cope with the deaths of both Dracula and her lover Beauregard. According to Newman, he brought her back because he realized her story still was not finished.
She appears in several of the short stories set afterwards. In the 1970s, under the name "Gené Dee", she becomes a private investigator after assisting Philip Marlowe in a case, These stories were incorporated into the novel Johnny Alucard.
Genevieve returns in Anno Dracula One Thousand Monsters, a prequel novel set in 1899. A ship of vampires, led by Genevieve, Captain Kostaki, Sergeant Dravot and Princess Christina Light, are exiled from England, seek refuge in Japan, and are trapped in Yokai Town, a ghetto where Tokyo's vampires are kept out of sight and out of mind. The events of the novel serve as a prologue to the forthcoming Anno Dracula 1999: Daikaiju.
A devout Roman Catholic, she spent much of her early life wondering if she truly was damned as her priest had stated, but later learned to ignore and outgrow such self-destructive sentiments.
The Diogenes Club
Genèvieve Sandrine Ysolde Dieudonné, also known as "Jennifer Dee" and "Geneva Deodati", has appeared in a number of Newman's Diogenes Club books and short stories, along with several Anno Dracula characters including Beauregard, Edwin Winthrop, and Catriona Kaye. Although she is reticent about her past, it presumably resembles that of her Anno Dracula counterpart up to the late 19th century, where Dracula's invasion of England succeeded in the Anno Dracula timeline and failed (if it occurred at all) in the main Diogenes Club timeline. In this timeline, she remained in England throughout the 20th century, doing occasional work with the Diogenes Club. It is mentioned by the Undertaking that she was excommunicated in 1638 by the Roman Inquisition.
This version of Genèvieve appears in the short story "The Big Fish", battling Lovecraftian menaces alongside Edwin Winthrop during World War II; four stories in the Seven Stars sequence ("The Trouble with Barrymore", a sequel to "The Big Fish"; "The Biafran Bank Manager"; "The Dog Story"; and "The Duel of Seven Stars"); and in the short story "Cold Snap", featuring 1970s Diogenes Club agent Richard Jeperson. She is a major character in "Sorcerer Conjurer Wizard Witch", which depicts her first meeting with Beauregard in the Diogenes Club timeline.
In Newman's short story "The Mark of Kane", collected in Tales of the Shadowmen Volume 4: Lords of Terror, Geneviève is briefly mentioned as one of the former agents of the "Angels of Music", a Charlie's Angels-type private detective agency run by Monsieur Erik out of the Paris Opera. When Newman expanded this story into a full novel (also entitled Angels of Music) and incorporated it into his Diogenes Club universe, she appears as a supporting character in the chapter "Les Vampires de Paris", in which she is living in Paris during the Belle Époque, where she works as a coroner and is implied to be a vampire once more.
Other
Geneviève Dieudonné is briefly mentioned in "In the Air", the first segment of Newman and Eugene Byrne's alternate history work Back in the USSA. In it, she is a schoolgirl around sixteen years old in a 1951 Kansas that is part of the United Socialist States of America, and has a love song written for her. She is presumably not a vampire in this universe, and it is unexplained how a girl in a poor town in Soviet Kansas had a French name.

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