Louise Gerard was a writer of ‘exotic’ romantic fiction, active between 1910 and the late thirties. She favoured settings that her readers would be unfamiliar with, although she meticulously researched the locations, travelling widely to do so. She favoured a type of storyline that I find particularly repulsive, of the type, boy meets girl, boy rapes girl, girl falls in love with boy, wherein the hero is usually an orphaned Englishman raised in the desert by Bedouin or similar nonsense.
My distaste notwithstanding, she was very popular in her day, being one of the fledgling Mills & Boon’s most successful authors and at least two of her novels were made into movies. Son of the Sahara was even reviewed by the New York Times in 1924.
Her work and that of others like her is beginning to attract serious academic study; she is discussed in Lynne Hapgood’s book Margins of desire. The suburbs in fiction and culture 1880-1925, and also in Jay Dixon’s book The Romance fiction of Mills & Boon.
Other modern readers however, seem to find her subject matter as distasteful as I do, as evidenced by this Book Crossing review of Fruit of Eden.
Her novels were:
A Golden Centipede 1910
The Hyena of Kallu 1910
A Tropical Tangle 1911
The Swimmer 1912
Flower of the Moon: a romance of the forest 1914
The virgin’s Treasure: a romance of the tropics 1915
Life’s Shadow Show 1916
Days of Probation 1917
The Mystery of ‘golden lotus’ 1919
Spanish Vendetta 1920
A Sultan’s Slave 1921
Necklace of tears 1922
Wreath of Stars: a romance of Venice 1923
Shadow of the Palm 1925
The Fruit of Eden 1927
The Harbour of Desire 1927
Wild Winds 1929
The Dancing Boy 1928
A Strange Young Man 1931
Secret Love 1932
Strange Paths 1934
Following Footsteps 1936
To me, some of these titles read as if they’ve come out of one of those online title generators, correction, they all do.
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