Emily Gerard. A Scottish Victorian Author

The two years spent in Transylvania were among the most agreeable of sixteen years’ acquaintance with Austrian military life, and I shall always look back to this time as to something quaint and exceptional, totally different from all previous and subsequent experiences. Much interested in the wild beauty of the country, the strange admixture of races by which it is peopled, and their curious and varied folk-lore. (Emily Gerard) Worldwide is Emily Gerard mentioned for her article Transylvanian Superstitions which made the Irish Bram Stoker (another marginal of Victorian Britain) change the location of his Dracula from the Tyrol to the much more exotic Transylvania. This reference is common in the international scholarship on Bram Stoker. But the rest of Gerard’s literary work entered a thick cone of oblivion though her work is much richer. She wrote novels in collaboration with her sister Dorothea. They signed as E.D. Gerard. Emily also published novels and short stories that she wrote on her own. But from the Romanian perspective, her travelogue The Land beyond the Forest, inspired from her stay in Transylvania, is of utmost importance. But certainly, from the point of view of Romanian-British contacts, Emily Gerard is a writer who cannot be neglected. Alina Daniela Suciu's book continues the Romanian bibliography on this writer (the articles by Andraş, Mudure, and Teuceanu), but her study is more ample than these previous attempts to valorize Gerard. Suciu’s monograph is a solid research, clearly structured, an interesting contribution to Scottish Studies, literary studies, women’s studies and a valuable discussion of nomadic transnationalism. Any further attempt to discuss Emily Gerard will have to take Alina Daniela Suciu's study into consideration. (Mihaela Mudure