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)

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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)

ALINA DANIELA SUCIU was born on the 6th December 1984 in Bistrita, Romania. She graduated the Faculty of Letters at the Babeş-Bolyai University from Cluj-Napoca in 2007. She received her MA degree in Human Resources Management at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration in 2008. In 2018 she obtained her PhD in English Literature and the current book is based on her PhD thesis, “Emily Gerard, a Minorized Victorian Author”. Besides this monograph, she published some articles in literary magazines, such as Change and Exchange-Proceedings of the Fifth National Conference, Studia Universitatis Babeş-Bolyai Philologia, Construction of Identities. From 2008 onwards, she has been teaching English in her native town. Momentarily, she is an English teacher at “Liviu Rebreanu” National College, Bistrita.