George Egerton emerged with great fanfare on the London publishing scene at the height of the New Woman phenomenon in the early 1890s. Her first published work, the volume of short stories entitled Keynotes (1893), immediately evidenced the public's fascination with feminist literary topics. While not the type of work to appeal to a wide readership in that it was issued by the Bodley Head—a house known for publishing niche, experimental, stylistically and thematically innovative texts whose sales figures hitherto were typically modest—Keynotes struck a chord with readers, selling more than 6,000 copies for the firm over a short period. In comparison, it would take Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) more than five years to sell its first thousand copies, and this despite the attention the novel received from critics when it was originally serialized (MacLeod 46). Equally successful in America, in 1895 Keynotes was reported there to have outsold every volume of short stories apart from the perennially popular works of Rudyard Kipling, and in Germany had entered its third printing by 1896 (Stetz, George Egerton, 34).

Despite her personal reluctance to associate herself with literary factions, Egerton is recognized as a central figure in the British Decadent movement and arguably the most important and controversial female innovator in terms of literary style and subject matter at the fin de siècle. Although Keynotes was and remains the most read and discussed of her literary texts, her body of work—comprised of a further four volumes of short stories (Discords, 1894; Symphonies, 1897; Fantasias, 1898; Flies in Amber, 1905) and two novels (The Wheel of God, 1898; Rosa Amorosa: The Love-Letters of a Woman, 1901)—is diverse, experimental, and premonitory in its interrogations of gender, sexuality, addiction, and mental illness. Also notable are the range of fictional and dramatic works she translated for publication and/or performance, including the first English-language edition of Knut Hamsun's novel Hunger (1890 / trans. 1898), which was published with a cover designed by William T. Horton, and Ola Hansson's Nietzschean tales Young Ofeg's Ditties (1895).

In many respects, Egerton was an unlikely candidate for literary success. She was the eldest child of Isabel George-Bynon and Captain John J. Dunne, a man who had managed to achieve a notable degree of infamy during the period of his daughter's upbringing, and who by the time of Egerton's birth in Australia in 1859 had already been cashiered from the military and reduced to serving as a volunteer in the Maori War. He would later spend several months in Dublin's Marshalsea Prison for debt, and by the end of the 1880s had been dismissed from the Irish prison service for misconduct (Trevelyan 1884). Consistently unemployed and perpetually in debt throughout his life, Captain Dunne was said to exist primarily "on air and other people" (De Vere White 12).

As controversial as her father was, however, the most notable scandal of Egerton's early life was entirely of her own making: her elopement in the autumn of 1887 with the Reverend Henry Peter Higginson Whyte Melville. "Higginson," as Egerton referred to him, was then 51 years old and married to his second wife, Charlotte Whyte Melville, the woman for whom Egerton had been acting as a paid companion (Whyte Melville). Through this act of running away with a married man, Egerton became embroiled in what one contemporary account termed "as choice a sensation as has agitated London and Dublin Church and Court circles in a good while." To render the situation even more scandalous, Higginson funded the escape with the £20,000 that his wife had gifted him on their marriage, and in December of 1887 Egerton’s father fired a pistol as he and Higginson “were being driven through the streets [of Dublin] in a hansom,” an altercation that was reported at length in leading newspapers. Egerton's father was arrested and quickly released, while Higginson and Egerton escaped Ireland, travelled widely in Europe, married in Detroit in the summer of 1888 (after the groom’s second marriage had been formally dissolved), and eventually settled in Norway on a farm in Langesund near Christiania (later renamed Oslo), where they lived until Higginson’s death in June of 1889 ("Ireland" 6).

This Norwegian interlude proved formative to Egerton's literary development. There, she actively sought out the most challenging and experimental of literary works, reading not only Strindberg and Ibsen but also, and very early on, Friedrich Nietzsche. Holbrook Jackson would later assert that she was the first English-language writer to mention Nietzsche in print, in her story "A Cross Line," from Keynotes, in 1893 (Jackson 129). Available evidence indicates that she may at least have been the first to do so in a work of fiction. Although Nietzsche and his work are mentioned in English language periodicals as early as 1872 and in newspapers by 11 September 1875, when his name appears in an Examiner review of Edouard Scharé's Le Drame Musicale, the first mention of him in the English press in relation to a fictional text appears to be a November 1893 review of the work of German-language author Anna Croissant-Rust, in which her literary themes are compared to his ("Analytical Remarks" 83; "Literature" 1029; "Reviews" 4).

In 1890, Egerton had a brief, ill-fated (and, according to her biographer Margaret Stetz, unrequited) romance with the Norwegian author and future Nobel Prize winner Knut Hamsun, whose novel Hunger she had read and admired during her Norwegian sojourn. By 1891 she was living in England, where she met and married Egerton Tertius Clairmonte, a Canadian who had recently failed to earn his fortunes in South Africa (Stetz, George Egerton, 21). She returned with Clairmonte to Ireland in 1892 and appears only then to have realized the degree to which the controversy that surrounded her first marriage had distanced her from her Irish Catholic friends and relations. This sense of alienation almost certainly helps to account for the fact that, when she began her attempts to forge a writing career from a rented cottage in Millstreet, County Cork shortly after her homecoming, she assumed the pseudonym by which she is now known, one which was unlikely to be traced to her homeland. She explained that she chose “George” after her mother’s surname as a tribute, and “Egerton” was, of course, a nod of appreciation to her second husband. She followed her writing career to England in 1893 and settled in London, which became her primary city of residence for the remainder of her life.

Submitted anonymously, Keynotes was published by John Lane and Elkin Mathews of the Bodley Head and illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley. Like other Bodley Head and Beardsley-illustrated publications, it was quickly associated with both the literary fin de siècle and Decadent movements. Phenomenally successful (and notorious) on both sides of the Atlantic, it inspired Lane to issue a "Keynotes" series of books, which quickly became, according to Kirsten MacLeod, “the most famous venue of British Decadent fiction” (115). It also made Egerton a celebrity: she was interviewed in the leading magazines of the day, and in 1894 was famously lampooned in Punch in two articles mockingly titled "She-Notes by Borgia Smudgiton."

From the first, her works were branded sexually licentious for reasons that are relatively straightforward to fathom. In "A Cross Line," the opening story of Keynotes, for example, Egerton promptly asserted her advocacy of greater sexual freedom for women by conjuring a scene in which her heroine envisions herself dancing before an audience of men, over whom she exerts a mesmerizing form of sexual control. The passage reaches an orgasmic crescendo in which the woman is pictured "with parted lips and panting, rounded breasts, and a dancing devil in each glowing eye," as she "sway[s] voluptuously to the wild music that rises […] seductive, intoxicating" (Keynotes and Discords 20). Taking its rebellious cue from Ivan Turgenev's 1877 novel of the same title, "Virgin Soil," from her second collection, Discords (1894), portrayed an alternative but no less contentious version of female identity, and asserted that "marriage becomes for many women a legal prostitution, a nightly degradation, a hateful yoke under which they age, mere bearers of children" (Keynotes and Discords 155). As she expanded her themes over the course of her first two volumes of short stories, so too did the assaults on her literary integrity and her personal morality gain in vehemence. In an 1895 article published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, for instance, Hugh E. M. Stutfield asserted that Egerton’s fiction was the “offspring of hysteria and foreign ‘degenerate’ influence” and “a fair type of English neurotic fiction, which some critics are trying to make us believe is very high-class literature.” Stutfield was also the first to explicitly note and condemn her references to Nietzsche—a man he described as “a German imbecile who, after several temporary detentions, was permanently confined in a lunatic asylum” (Stutfield 835). Sexual freedom, both within and outside of marriage, was only one of many controversial issues Egerton addressed in her texts, and her consistent promotion throughout her published works of the rights of working women, support of options for women other than marriage and motherhood, and advocacy of single parenthood and alternative parenting partnerships would not be out of place among much later feminist assertions.

For her part, Egerton never shied away from relating her work to "foreign" influences, nor did she object to the “Ibsenite” label often applied to her (Pearson 100). In more than one of her texts, she expressly refers to Ibsen and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, and her personal letters confirm that she looked to foreign writers including Ibsen, Bjørnson, Hamsun, Nietzsche, Strindberg, and Hansson as sources of inspiration for her writing. “I shall find it hard to keep up the modern touch necessary to my work,” she wrote to her father in 1893, “if I don't get current foreign literature” (Bright Papers 2/16). In popular conception, Egerton was also closely associated with Oscar Wilde (Macleod 6). It was a connection that went much deeper than the fact that the pair shared a publisher: Egerton and Wilde were also linked by their respective collaborations with Aubrey Beardsley, a controversial figure in his own right who had also illustrated Wilde’s 1894 edition of Salomé. Like Wilde’s, her work also benefitted from the advocacy of Richard Le Gallienne, the Bodley Head’s reader, and her position among the literary avant-garde was secured when her short story “A Lost Masterpiece” was placed centrally in the inaugural volume of The Yellow Book (April 1894), a magazine connected from its inception with the Decadents. This story, among her finest, artfully subverts the authority of the flâneur through the device of the autonomous urban female, whose presence not only interrupts but wholly frustrates the creative processes of the male narrator. She followed it in the same publication a year later with "The Captain's Book" (July 1895), another playful parable that lampoons the unrealizable literary ambitions of the central character, who is recognizably based on her own feckless father.

But the literary craze for her work was not destined to last. As Stetz notes, “in the spring of 1895 the English public became infected all at once with a mass revulsion toward anything ‘decadent,’ whether in life or in art. The catalyst for this change was the Oscar Wilde scandal” (Stetz, George Egerton, 88). Unsurprisingly, Irish Catholic opinion concerning her fiction remained far from favourable, as well. The Jesuit publication The Irish Monthly suggested about her works that they dealt "too much with the bold, bad world which conscientious people ought to shun, even in books" ("Notes on New Books" 221). Despite the Wilde debacle, however, she was disinclined to alter her literary output substantially enough to meet the Bodley Head's now more cautious publishing practices and turned from John Lane to Grant Richards for the publication of her final work of fiction of the 1890s, The Wheel of God (1898). Although critics noted that Egerton's tone in this novel was less confrontational than in her previous efforts—The Graphic referred to it as her attempt to represent "a New Woman, not of the 'revolting' type"—it did not stray far enough from the themes of her earlier work to appease a newly conservative British reading public ("New Novels" 64). While the novelist and dramatist Israel Zangwill would write to Egerton that his friends were “sing[ing] Hosannas” to the novel, and it was more often than not well reviewed in the press, it was not enthusiastically embraced by the public at large (Bright Papers 2/16). As a result of diminished sales, she would publish only two volumes of work—a philosophical epistolary novel, Rosa Amorosa (1901), and a final short story collection, Flies in Amber (1905) —after the turn of the century. Neither of these would prove popular successes. By 1899, the most fruitful portion of her writing life had passed; by the end of 1905, her publishing career had ended entirely.

Her personal life was also marked by peaks and troughs. In 1895, she gave birth to a son, George Egerton Clairmonte. Her marriage to the child's father, however, did not last. She and Clairmonte divorced in 1900 following his affair with an underage girl who gave birth to a daughter whom Egerton afterwards temporarily supported (Stetz, George Egerton, 82). Remaining in London after the divorce while Clairmonte returned to South Africa, Egerton married her third husband, Reginald Golding Bright, a theatrical agent fifteen years her junior, in 1901. This union would last until Golding Bright's death in 1941 and was certainly a love match on his part; he first declared his feelings to her in a letter that reads, "I love you—have loved you for nearly two years, though I lacked the courage to say it—all my thoughts are for you, my wishes, my ambitions. You are my inspiration, my life" (Bright Papers 1/12). A theatre critic, Golding Bright would go on to become the theatrical agent of Hall Caine, J. M. Barrie, W. Somerset Maugham, and George Bernard Shaw, and through him Egerton became immersed in the London theatrical world (Stetz, George Egerton, 144).

Although she had ceased publishing fiction, Egerton continued to be involved in literary pursuits of other kinds. She at first tried her hand at playwriting, and on September 23, 1908 wrote to her father to say that her play Our Irish Family was to be produced “on Oct. 5th at Wallack's Theatre New York.—It isn't a very good play + I don't expect much from it” (Bright Papers 2/17). Wallack's Theatre, though small, was well-known and popular, and the play thus had a chance of success. Launched under the title His Wife’s Family, it was greeted with largely positive reviews for its characterizations and humour, but the consensus of critics was that it was largely "eventless," and it closed after just fifteen performances ("New American Plays"; Stetz, “Feminist Politics,” 140).

Other theatrical endeavours fared similarly. Her follow-up drama, The Backsliders, was produced in both New York and Chicago in 1911 but failed to find an audience in either city despite, as Stetz notes, having the popular actress Annie Russell as its star (Stetz, “Feminist Politics,” 142). The run of Camilla States Her Case, starring Margaret Bannermann and produced at the Globe Theatre, London, was similarly truncated, lasting for just five weeks in January and February of 1925. Egerton appears to have fared better as a translator of the works of other (often French) playwrights: her translation of The Daughter of Heaven, a play in three acts by Pierre Loti and Judith Gautier, was produced at the Century Theatre in New York City in 1912, and production stills held in the New York Public Library attest to its lavish staging. Egerton's version of Robert de Flers and Gaston Arman de Caillavet's The Beautiful Adventure was produced at New York's Lyceum theatre in 1914, returned to the stage in London in the same year under the title Wild Thyme, and in 1916 was again produced in London as Good News at the Prince's Theatre (Stetz, George Egerton, 156; Billy Rose Theatre Division; New York Public Library Digital Collections).

Her son's death, aged just 19, at the Battle of Loos on either 25 or 26 September 1915 appears to have been the catalyst for her complete retreat from public literary life. Yet it also acted as the impetus for her subsequent friendships with literary men of her son's generation and younger, including Terence De Vere White, Austin Clarke, Seumas O'Sullivan and John Gawsworth. Writing to Gawsworth on 18 November 1931 she stated, “I was interested in you as I am interested in all young things trying to strike out for themselves to realise a dream, for the sake of my own boy who at the age you are now sacrificed his” (Gawsworth Papers GB 6 RUL MS 3547). Among these mentees, Clarke, O'Sullivan, and Gawsworth recall her with unmitigated fondness and note that she continued to write fiction of literary merit into her late life. Clarke’s memoir, for instance, refers to his reading of a collection of Egerton's “stories about the country [Ireland] which have not appeared in print,” at least one of which seems to have been prescient in confronting issues of institutionalised racism in her homeland. Clarke describes it as a tale about “a young [Black man] in the West Indies, a descendant of one of the Irish rebels sold into slavery in the Barbadoes [sic] during the Cromwellian period, [who] was so stirred by the Rising, that he saved up enough money to visit the country of his ancestors” (Clarke 178). Clarke goes on to explain that the protagonist's attempts to claim a kinship with the Irish rebels result only in derision and mockery. In a letter from 1938, O'Sullivan likewise praised another of Egerton's unpublished Easter Rising stories: “I cannot pay any higher complement [sic] to the author of 'the Two Dans' than to say that I found the reading of the latter portion extremely painful. […] You have with a skill little short of miraculous re-created the atmosphere of the places you describe and (this, I think is still more wonderful) reproduced the reactions of the crowd with a fidelity and accuracy which are beyond praise” (Bright Papers 1/51). Gawsworth's extensive notes on his first meeting with Egerton on 4 July 1931, when she was 71, describe her youthful magnetism and penchant for a literary anecdote: "(Immensely vivacious old lady. Not a day over 50) Memories of Hansson & Hamsun, the dialect dictionary. She went down to see Hamsun by steamer and said to him 'How like Björnsterne you are.' He reputed to be his bastard" (Gawsworth Papers).

George Egerton died in London on 13 August 1945 (“Mrs. Golding Bright”). In the ensuing years, her literary reputation has variously waxed and waned. Holbrook Jackson's assessment of her work in The Eighteen Nineties (1922) as "in the vanguard" of an important "new movement" and among the “more modern fiction of temperament and psychological analysis” did not withstand the challenges brought by the feminist recovery projects of the 1970s and 1980s (Jackson 47; 217). In her seminal A Literature of Their Own (1979), for instance, Elaine Showalter denounced her as among those feminist writers who had "but one story to tell" (Showalter 215). More recently, however, Egerton's work has garnered academic interest from scholars who recognize the importance of her literary experiments and project of portraying and interrogating the nuance and multiplicity of gendered identities and behaviours (Lawrence 2019; Sigley 2021). A growing body of research cites her as a potential influence on the literary modernizers who followed her, including, most notably, her Irish compatriot James Joyce, whose early works she admired (Standlee 2010; Bjørhovde 2012). Ongoing retrieval efforts have also yielded results. In June of 2022, Margaret Stetz and Alex Murray revealed in the Times Literary Supplement that they had re-discovered an Egerton story, “A Prince Obsessed,” a “highly individual appreciation of Wilde just as he was about to leave prison,” that had been excised from her volume Fantasias (1898) by The Bodley Head prior to its publication (Stetz and Murray). The previously unpublished story is printed in the TLS article in full.

© 2022 Whitney Standlee, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, University of Worcester.

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