Dorothea Gerard was a novelist and romance-writer whose general conservatism co-existed with a piercing eye for relations across national and ethnic divides, for antisemitism and other forms of prejudice. She was the author, too, of an interesting social study of the pan-European officer class to be found in the Imperial army of Austria. She wrote to please herself: later independently though at first in collaboration with her less prolific elder sister, Emily. She published thirteen titles between 1892 and 1914, almost all of them with Tauchnitz editions, which meant she was aiming at the market of English speakers travelling abroad.