Dorothea Gerard

Dorothea Mary Stanislaus Gerard (Mme Longard de Longgarde, 9 August 1855 – 29 September 1915) was a Scottish-born novelist and romance-writer who often wrote about controversial and unconventional subjects and "whose general conservatism co-existed with a piercing eye for relations across national and ethnic divides, for antisemitism and other forms of prejudice."

At first she wrote for pleasure with her less prolific older sister Emily Gerard but later carved an independent career publishing about forty books between 1890 and 1916 mostly for Tauchnitz editions signifying her target audience was mainly English-speaking visitors travelling in Europe.

"[5] On 12 April 1887 at Marburg Dorothea Gerard married Captain (later Major-General) Julius Longard of the 7th Austrian Lancers[6] in the Austro-Hungarian Army following which she spent much of her subsequent life in Austria and Galicia in Eastern Europe where she also set many of her novels, many of which involved romantic liaisons between European nobility.

Following her marriage her collaboration with her sister Emily ceased[3] and Dorothea Gerard became successful as a writer of novels in her own right, including Recha, Etelka's Vow and A Queen of Curds and Cream.

[9][10][11] As Dorothea Longard de Longgarde she became arguably the more successful and certainly the more prolific novelist of the two sisters, so much so that in 1893 she was interviewed for 'Portraits of Celebrities at Different Ages' in The Strand Magazine.