Emily Gerard

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EG wrote and published novels, short stories, reviews, and a travel book during the late nineteenth and very early twentieth centuries. Her earliest novels were produced in collaboration with her more prolific younger sister, Dorothea . She wrote to please herself, with no anxieties about earnings. Her stories are plot-driven, often structured around some witty or paradoxical idea. Her novels are more nuanced and interesting, dealing with masculine subject-matter like adventure, politics, or science, in which, however, gender issues are often involved.

Milestones

7 May 1849

EG was born at Chesters, Jedburgh, near Airdrie in Roxburghshire, Scotland.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder.

By 10 March 1888

EG wrote and published in two volumes The Land Beyond the Forest. Facts, Figures, and Fancies from Transylvania, an account of the place and of her own experiences there.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
3150 (1888): 301

Early 1891

EG published the first of her novels in which her sister had no part: A Secret Mission, remarkable as an early spy novel by a woman, and for its depiction of female power.
This book is dated by the stamp inside the Bodleian Library 's copy.
Gerard, Emily. A Secret Mission. W. Blackwood and Sons.
prelims

11 January 1905

EG died at Vienna, five weeks after the death of her husband .
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

By 23 November 1906

EG 's final work appeared posthumously: Honour's Glassy Bubble: A Story of Three Generations, a novel which attacks and imaginatively vanquishes a militaristic tradition of European patriarchy.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
TLS Centenary Archive Centenary Archive [1902-2012]. http://www.gale.com/c/the-times-literary-supplement-historical-archive.
254 (23 November 1906): 395

Biography

Birth and Family

7 May 1849

EG was born at Chesters, Jedburgh, near Airdrie in Roxburghshire, Scotland.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder.