Эмили Джерард: Шотландская писательница и трансильванские легенды.

Scottish writer

(Jane) Emily Gerard (7 May 1849 – 11 January 1905) was a Scottish 19th century author best known for the influence her collections of Transylvanian folklore had on Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula.

Emily Gerard was born on 7 May 1849 at Chesters, Jedburgh, Scotland, the oldest daughter of Colonel Archibald Gerard (1812–80) of Rochsoles, Lanarkshire and Euphemia Erskine (1818–70), daughter of the inventor Sir John Robison (1778–1843). She had three sisters and three brothers including General Sir Montagu Gilbert Gerard (1842–1905). She was descended from Alexander Gerard (1728–95) a philosophical writer, Archibald Alison (1757–1839) a Scottish Episcopalian minister and writer, and Gilbert Gerard (1760–1815) a minister of the Church of Scotland and theological writer. Her sister Dorothea, born on 9 August 1855 at New Monkland, Lanarkshire, was also a novelist. The Gerard family lived in Vienna from 1863 to 1866, during which time Emily began a life long friendship with Princess Marguerite de Bourbon, whose family had been friends with the Robisons since the Scottish exile of Marguerita's great grandfather, Charles X. She was home schooled until she was 15, when she continued her education studying European languages at the convent of the Sacré Coeur at Riedenburg in Austria for three years. The family background was originally Scottish Episcopalian, and when their mother converted to Catholicism in 1848, the sisters were raised Catholic. She had two sons. She was joined by her sisters in 1870, following the death of their mother. Her book The Land Beyond the Forest (1890) and essay "Transylvania Superstitions" is credited with inspiring Bram Stoker to write Dracula. The latter publication also introduced Stoker to the term "Nosferatu" to describe the undead. Gerard writes:More decidedly evil is the nosferatu, or vampire, in which every Roumanian peasant believes as firmly as he does in heaven or hell. There are two sorts of vampires, living and dead. The living vampire is generally the illegitimate offspring of two illegitimate persons; but even a flawless pedigree will not insure any one against the intrusion of a vampire into their family vault, since every person killed by a nosferatu becomes likewise a vampire after death, and will continue to suck the blood of other innocent persons till the spirit has been exorcised by opening the grave of the suspected person, and either driving a stake through the corpse, or else firing a pistol shot into the coffin. To walk smoking round the grave on each anniversary of the death is also supposed to be effective in confining the vampire. In very obstinate cases of vampirism it is recommended to cut off the head, and replace it in the coffin with the mouth filled with garlic, or to extract the heart and burn it, strewing its ashes over the grave. That such remedies are often resorted to even now is a well attested fact, and there are probably few Roumanian villages where such have not taken place within memory of the inhabitants. There is likewise no Roumanian village which does not count among its inhabitants some old woman (usually a midwife) versed in the precautions to be taken in order to counteract vampires, and who makes of this science a flourishing trade. Elements from this passage, including the local peasants' suspicions of the vampire, obviously appear in the first part of Dracula.

In 1897 Gerard wrote to William Blackwood, of Blackwood's Magazine, asking to be introduced to the American author Mark Twain. When Blackwood obliged, Gerard met and befriended Mark Twain, to whom The Extermination of Love (1901) is dedicated. In a letter to Blackwood, Gerard wrote of Mark Twain that he was "an excessively serious, almost solemn person but when one can get him in the right vein he is quite fascinating." In A. S. Levetus' 1905 piece for Womanhood entitled "What Women are Doing in Austria," she writes, "[Emily Gerard] possesses a fertile imagination and a lively and convincing way of conveying her thoughts to others, a rich gift of language, enhanced by her acquaintances with foreign tongues, all of which she speaks and writes with the same fluency as her native tongue." However, it was felt that other members of Gerard's family appealed more to the public as writers of novels. In 1905 obituaries for Gerard published in both The Times and The Atheneum, her sister's Dorothea's wider appeal was remarked upon. The Times observed that Emily "had not won equal popularity with that of her sister," while The Atheneum decided she was in her own right, " a capable novelist, with an excellent gift for telling a story."