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 her 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 first volume recounts her first impressions and the superstitions and customs of the Romanian and Saxon populations.