The Land Beyond the Forest
Facts, Figures, and Fancies from Transylvania

Gerard's informative and highly readable travelogue about the country and people of Transylvania inspired Bram Stoker when writing Dracula.

Emily Gerard (Author)

9781108021609, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 25 November 2010

368 pages, 20 b/w illus.
21.6 x 14 x 2.1 cm, 0.47 kg

Novelist Emily Gerard (1849–1905) went with her husband, an officer in the Austrian army, to Transylvania for two years in 1883. Then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, today a region of western Romania, Transylvania was little known to readers back in England. In the years following, she wrote this full-length account (published in 1888) as well as several articles on the region, which Bram Stoker used when researching the setting for Dracula. She describes her encounters with the different nationalities that made up the Transylvanian people: Romanians, Saxons and gypsies. Full of startling anecdotes and written in a novelistic style, her work combines her personal recollections with a detailed account of the landscape and people. The first volume recounts her first impressions and the superstitions and customs of the Romanian and Saxon populations. For more information on this author, see http://orlando.cambridge.org/public/svPeople?person_id=geraem

1. Introductory
2. Historical
3. Political
4. Arrival in Transylvania. First impressions
5. Saxon historical feast. Legend
6. The Saxons. Character, Education, Religion
7. Saxon villages
8. Saxon interiors. Character
9. Saxon churches and sieges
10. The Saxon village pastor
11. The Saxon brotherhoods. Neighbourhoods and village hann
12. The Saxons. Dress, spinning and dancing
13. The Saxons. Betrothal
14. The Saxons. Marriage
15. The Saxon. Birth and infancy
16. The Saxon. Death and burial
17. The Roumanians. Their origin
18. The Roumanians. Their religion. Popas and churches
19. The Roumanians. Their character
20. Roumanian life
21. Roumanian marriage and morality
22. The Roumanians. Dancing, songs, music, stories, and proverbs
23. Roumanian poetry
24. The Roumanians. Nationality and atrocities
25. The Roumanians. Death and burial. Vampires and were-wolves
26. Roumanians superstition. Days and hours.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]