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)

9781108021616, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 17 February 2011

402 pages, 22 b/w illus. 1 map
21.6 x 2.3 x 14 cm, 0.51 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 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 second volume covers the gypsy and Jewish populations, as well as Gerard's mixed feelings on leaving the country. For more information on this author, see http://orlando.cambridge.org/public/svPeople?person_id=geraem

27. Roumanian superstition continued. Animals, weather, mixed superstitions, spirits, shadows, etc.
28. Saxon superstition. Remedies, witches, weather-makers
29. Saxon superstition continued. Animals, plants, days
30. Saxon customs and dramas
31. Buried treasures
32. The Tziganes. Liszt and Lenau
33. The Tziganes. Their life and occupations
34. The Tziganes. Humour, proverbs, religion and morality
35. The gipsy fortune-teller
36. The Tzigane musician
37. Gipsy poetry
38. The Szekels and Armenians
39. Frontier regiments
40. Wolves, bears, and other animals
41. A Roumanian village
42. A gipsy camp
43. The Bruckenthals
44. Still-life at Hermanstadt. A Transylvanian Cranford
44. Fire and blood. The Hermanstadt murder
46. The Klausenburg carnival
47. Journey from Hermanstadt to Kronstadt
48. Kronstadt
49. Sinala
50. Up the mountains
51. The Bulea See
52. The Wienerwald. A digression
53. A week in the pine-region
54. La Dus and Bistra
55. A night in the Stina
56. Farewell to Transylvania. The enchanted garden.

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