George Egerton

Title page of the American edition of the novel Keynotes by George Egerton by Aubrey Beardsley , 1893

George Egerton , actually Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright (born December 14, 1859 in Emerald, Australia or Auckland , New Zealand ; † August 12, 1945 in London ) was an English-speaking writer and feminist .

Considered by many critics as one of the most important "new women writers" at the fin de siècle , she cultivated friendships with George Bernard Shaw , Ellen Terry and JM Barrie . As a thematically and substantively radical feminist, she campaigned for the self-determination of women, although she did not originally see herself as a feminist and primarily demanded sexual rights for women .

Life

George Egerton was on 14 December 1859 Mary Chavelita Dunne in Australia as the daughter of a Welsh - Protestant mother, Isabel George (-Byron) and her Irish - Catholic a known father, Captain John J. Dunne, a former naval officer and author at the time Fishing book, born. The early years of her childhood were marked by traveling between Australia, New Zealand and Chile , but the formative years she spent in Dublin and its surroundings, which she herself described as “intensely Irish”. Growing up as an Irish Catholic in a non-middle-class family, she was enrolled in Germany for two years when she was a teenager . There she already demonstrated a talent for the arts and languages. Over the years she should be fluent in a number of languages ​​including German , French , Norwegian , Swedish, and Russian . Although she aspired to an artistic career, she received training as a nurse , which she completed in hospitals in London and New York .

As a young adult , Egerton emigrated to the United States . In 1886 she returned to Ireland as the travel companion of Charlotte Whyte Melville and her husband Henry Higginson, a clergyman and friend of her father's. Thereupon she ran away with Reverend Henry Higginson to Norway, where she stayed for two years and lived with the heavy alcoholic in a marriage-like relationship until his death in 1889. These were formative years for her in view of her intellectual form and artistic development. During her stay in Norway she dealt intensively with the works of Henrik Ibsen , August Strindberg , Ola Hansson , Friedrich Nietzsche and Knut Hamsun .

Her brief romance with Hamsun in 1890 served as inspiration for her short story Now Spring Has Come , published three years later . When it became clear that Knut Hamsun would in all likelihood win the Nobel Prize for Literature , Egerton was the first to make Hamsun's work accessible to the English-speaking readership by translating his first novella, Sult ( Hunger ).

Her subsequent marriage to Canadian short story writer Egerton Tertius Clairmonte gave rise to her first attempts at writing fictional works of her own - spurred on by his poor financial base - and her desire to overcome the boredom of returning to rural Ireland can. She chose the pseudonym "George Egerton" as a tribute to both her mother's surname and Clairmonte. When asked how her name would be pronounced correctly, she emphasized it as edg'er-ton and added that, to her knowledge, she had heard it from everyone who had that name in England.

Egerton's first book with short stories, Keynotes , which William Heinemann initially rejected (German translation only in 1991 as a key experience , to this day the only of their translated works in German), was published by John Lane and Elkin Mathews at Bodley Head in 1893. Significantly, the envelope design came from Aubrey Beardsley . This work was so successful and at the same time notorious on both sides of the Atlantic that Egerton was soon interviewed by all leading newspapers and magazines and parodied in Punch as Borgia Smudgiton , author of the She-Notes . Egerton himself was surprised that the punch exaggerated details of her appearance, such as her short hair and her glasses, as a type of new woman , a "male harpy ", clichéd. Hoping to take advantage of this success of keynotes , Bodley Head published a series of books called the Keynotes series with a total of 19 short stories and fourteen novellas, including titles by Grant Allen and Richard LeGallienne .

In a way, keynotes were the high point of her literary career. A following compendium with short stories, Discords , and its later successors with two additional collections of short stories ( Symphonies and Flies in Amber ), two short stories ( Rosa Amorosa and The Wheel of God ), as well as a book about Nietzsche's parables were real failures in direct comparison.

Her later realization as a dramaturge, such as with Camilla States Her Case (1925) and as a translator of mostly French theater plays, created only a few appealing successful productions. So she translated u. a. His Wife's Family by Pierre Loti and Henri Bernsteins The Attack , The Beautiful Adventure and La Rafale .

However, Egerton's work had stimulated academic debate in the years that followed. Her reputation rose slowly but steadily, which was only reinforced when reprints of her work were published in the 1970s and late 1980s. In her feminist literary history, A Literature of Their Own , Elaine Showalter was one of the first to recognize Egerton's contributions to English literature. According to her words, Egerton invented a new literary form for the feminine subconscious ("invent a new literary form for the feminine unconscious").

In recent times, Egerton has often been interpreted in terms of how she herself relates to the British New Woman movement in literature. Their own stylistic developments, mostly referred to as proto-modern by literary scholars, and their choice of topics, often radical and feminist, led to them being examined academically in both the USA and the UK. Egerton's attempts with form and content anticipated the modern developments of authors such as James Joyce or DH Lawrence . Egerton's The Wheel of God was often understood as a real template for Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man .

Thomas Hardy openly admitted Egerton's influence on his own work. Egerton was a role model for creating his own New Woman character, Sue Bridehead, in Jude the Obscure . Holbrook also paid special tribute to Jackson Egerton for being the first to mention Nietzsche with keynotes in English literature in 1893 - three years before Nietzsche's works were even translated into English.

In 1895 - according to other information in 1901 - she divorced Egerton Clairmont and married the theater agent Reginald Golding Bright in 1901. Her only son from the marriage with Clairmont, George Egerton Clairmonte (* 1895), was supposed to be adopted in Cambridge , but died in 1915 in the First World War . In the mid-1920s she herself worked as a theater agent for Shaw and William Somerset Maugham .

After George Egerton stepped down from the literary limelight, she refused any further interviews and lived in seclusion in London, where she died on August 12, 1945, four years after her second husband Golding Bright.

In addition to the literary personalities already mentioned, she also maintained correspondence with Herbert Beerbohm Tree , Oscar Wilde and William Butler Yeats .

Her cousin Terence de Vere White collected her letters and published them together with his memories of her in 1958 as A Leaf from the Yellow Book .

plant

Cover of Yellow Book. Vol. 1, Aubrey Beardsley, 1894

• Now Spring Has Come . 1893.
• Keynotes . Bodley Head 1893.
• Keynotes and Discords . Ed. Martha Vicinus. London: Virago, 1895.
• The Yellow Book . Volume I. 1894.
• The Yellow Book . Volume V. 1895.
• Symphonies . London and New York: John Lane / The Bodley Head, 1897.
• The Wheel of God . New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1898.
• Rosa Amorosa: the Love Letters of a Woman . London: Grant Richards 1901.
• Amber tile. London: Grant Richards 1905
• Terence De Vere White: A Leaf from the Yellow Book. London: The Richards Press, 1958.

In anthologies

• Joan Smith (Ed.): Femmes de Siecles, stories from the 90s, women writing at the end of two centuries. London: Chatto & Windus 1992, including George Egerton A Nocturne .
• Virgin Soil. In: Janet Madden-Simpson: Woman's Part ... short fiction by and about Irish women 1890-1960 . Dublin 1984.

Dramas

• His Wife's Family. 1908.
• The backsliders. 1910.
• Camilla states her case . 1925.

In German translation

• Key experience: narratives . Translated from English by Ingrid von Rosenberg , in cooperation with students from the University of Duisburg . With an afterword by Ingrid von Rosenberg, Ullstein, Frankfurt a. M. / Berlin 1991, ISBN 3-548-30254-8 .

literature

• Chrisman, Laura. "Empire, 'Race' and Feminism at the fin de siècle: The Work of George Egerton and Olive Schreiner." Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle. Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken (ed). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1995. 45-65.
• Dowling, Linda. "The Decadent and the New Woman in the 1890's." Nighteenth-Century Fiction, 33.4 (1979). 434-453.
• Fluhr, Nicole M. "Figuring the New Woman: Writers and Mothers in George Egerton's Early Stories." Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 43.3 (2001). Austin: University of Texas Press.
• Forward, Stephanie. "Attitudes to Marriage and Prostitution in the Writings of Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird, Sarah Grand, and George Egerton." Women's History Review, 8.1 (1999). 53-80.
• Foerster, Ernst: The question of women in the novels of George Egerton, Mona Caird and Sarah Grand: Contributions to the English literature of the latest time. Part I, Marburg 1907.
• Gawsworth, John: Ten Contemporaries: Notes Toward Their Definitive Bibliography. London: Ernest Benn, 1932.
• Hamsun, Knut: Hunger. Translation by George Egerton. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003.
• Hansson, Laura Marholm: Six Modern Women: Psychological Sketches. Trans. Hermione Ramsden. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1896.
• Harris, Wendell V. "Egerton: Forgotten Realist" Victorian Newsletter, 33 (1968). Pp. 31-35.
• Heilmann, Ann: The New Woman in the New Millennium: Recent Trends in Criticism of New Woman Fiction. In: Literature Compass 3/1 (2006) VI 177, pp. 32-42.
• Hoffmann, Leonore Noll. "A Delicate Balance: The Resolutions to Conflict of Women in the Fiction of Four Women Writers of the Victorian Period." Dissertation Abstracts International, 35 (1975). 4432A-33A.
• Jusova, Iveta. "George Egerton and the Project of British Colonialism." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 19.1 (2000). Pp. 27-56.
• Jusova, Iveta: The New Woman and the Empire. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005.
• Liggins. "'With a Dead Child in her Lap': Bad Mothers and Infant Mortality in George Egerton's Discords." Literature and History, 9.2 (2000). 17-37.
• McCracken, Scott: 'A Novel From / On the Margins: George Egerton's The Wheel of God. Gender and Colonialism. Eds. L. Pilkington et al: Galway: Galway University Press, 1995, pp. 139-157.
• McCullough, Kate. "Mapping the 'Terra Incognita' of Woman: George Egerton's Keynotes (1993) and New Woman Fiction." The New Nineteenth Century: Feminist Readings of Underread Victorian Fiction. Barbara Harman, Susan Meyer and Joan Sutherland (ed.). New York: Garland. 1996, pp. 205-223.
• Middlebrook, L. Ruth. "The Last of the Women Georges." College English, 10.3 (1948). Pp. 141-146.
• Miles, Rosie: Bitextuality and Cultural (Re) Production in the 1890s. In: Women's Writing, Volume 3, Issue 3 1996, pp. 243-259.
• Noe, Mark. "Crossing the Line in 'A Cross Line': The Frontier in George Egerton's Short Fiction." The Image of the Frontier in Literature, the Media, and Society. Stephen Kaplan and Will Wright (ed.). Pueblo: University of Southern Colorado; 1997, pp. 222-226.
• Noe, Mark. "Usurping the Superman: The Sporting Superwoman in George Egerton's Short Fiction." Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature, 15.1 (1997). Pp. 15-30.
• Ousby, Ian. Ed. "Egerton, George." The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1992. 308.
• Ousby, Ian. Ed. "Egerton, George." The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1992. 308.
• Rich, Charlotte: Reconsidering the awakening: The literary sisterhood of Kate Chopin and George Egerton, Southern Quarterly, Spring 2003
• Schwartz-McKinzie, Esther. "'Play with the Stories a Little While': Mobility of Mind in Short Fictions by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, George Egerton and Sarah Grand." Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, 63.1 (2002). 178.
• Sutherland, John: Victorian Fiction, Longmans 1988
• O'Toole, Tina: 'Keynotes from Millstreet, Co. Cork: George Egerton's Transgressive Fictions ;. Colby Library Quarterly 36.2 (2000): 145-156.
• O'Toole, Tina: 'George Egerton's Transgressive Fictions', in Anne Fogarty, ed., “Irish Women Novelists 1800-1940”, Colby Quarterly, 2 [Special Issue] (June 2000) pp. 145-56.
• Selected Papers of Mary Chavelita Bright. Reference C0105. Manuscripts Division. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Princeton University Library.
• Standlee, Whitney: Displaced Identities in the Short Stories of George Egerton. Unpublished MA thesis. Humanities Department. University of Central Lancashire: Preston, United Kingdom, 2006.
• Stetz, Margaret Diane: '"George Egerton": Woman and Writer of the Eighteen Nineties'. Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis. The Department of English and American Language and Literature. Harvard University: Cambridge n.d.
• Stetz, Margaret D. "Keynotes: A New Woman, Her Publisher, and Her Material." Studies in the Literary Imagination, 30.1 (1997). Pp. 89-107.
• Stetz, Margaret D. "Turning Points: 'George Egerton' (Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright)." Turn-of-the-Century Women, 1.1 (1984). Pp. 2-3.
• VanHoosier-Carey, Kimberly. "George Egerton." Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Abigail Burnham Bloom. Westport: Greenwood, 2000.
• Vicinus, Martha. "Rediscovering the 'New Woman' of the 1890s: The Stories of 'George Egerton'." Feminist Re-Visions: What Has Been and Might Be. Vivian Patraka and Louise Tilly (ed.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. 1983, pp. 12-25.

Web links

• Literature by and about George Egerton in the catalog of the German National Library
• George Egerton in "Project Gutenberg" (her translation of "Hunger" and a short story in an anthology) (English)
• Selected documents Mary Chavelita Brights at Princeton University Library (English)
• George Egerton's translation of Knut Hamsun Hunger at Google Book Search (English)
• George Egerton's Bewitching New Woman
• Portal page on the phenomenon of the New Woman (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ George Egerton Clairmonte on thepeerage.com , accessed August 20, 2015.
2. ↑ http://www.nipissingu.ca/faculty/annbg/myweb/george_egerton.htm  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
3. ^ Terence De Vere White, A Leaf from the Yellow Book, London: The Richards Press, 1958, p. 14.
4. ↑ Carolyn Christensen Nelson: A new woman reader: fiction, articles, and drama of the 1890s. Broadview Press, 2001, ISBN 1-55111-295-7 , p. 7.
5. ↑ Laura Chilcoat: The New Woman Short Story: George Egerton and A Cross Line  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as broken. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
6. ^ Charles Earle Funk, What's the Name, Please ?, Funk & Wagnalls 1936.
7. ↑ http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/c1718cs/neh-sum09/content/introduction.html
8. ↑ http://www.nipissingu.ca/faculty/annbg/myweb/george_egerton.htm  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
9. ^ William Greenslade / Terence Rodgers: Grant Allen: literature and cultural politics at the Fin de Siècle. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. 2005, ISBN 0-7546-0865-4 , p. 115.
10. ↑ Vanessa Warne / Colette Colligan: The man who wrote an new woman novel: Grant Allen's the woman who did and the gendering of new woman authorship. In: Victorian Literature and Culture, 33, pp. 21-46.
11. ↑ To his biography: http://www.bookrags.com/biography/richard-le-gallienne-dlb/
12. ^ Wendell V. Harris: John Lane's Keynotes Series and the Fiction of the 1890's. In: PMLA, Vol. 83, No. 5 (Oct. 1968), pp. 1407-1413.
13. ↑ Selected Papers of Mary Chavelita Bright, 1876–1950: Finding Aid ( Memento of the original from July 14, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
14. ↑ Elaine Showalter: A Literature of Their Own. Princeton 1998, ISBN 0-691-00476-5 .
15. ↑ Showalter, Elaine. Introduction. Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin de Siècle. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers UP, 1993. vii-xx.
16. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from March 28, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
17. ^ Ardis, Ann L. New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1990. Ledger, Sally. The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the fin de siècle. New York: Manchester UP, 1997.
18. ^ TRM Creighton: The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy. Vol. 6, 1920-1925 by Richard Little Purdy; Michael Millgate; Thomas Hardy. In: The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 40, No. 160 (Nov. 1989), pp. 581-583.
19. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from March 2, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
20. ↑ Holbrook Jackson: The Eighteen Nineties. 1st edition. 1913, NA READ BOOKS 2008, p. 217ff.
21. ↑ http://www.pgil-eirdata.org/html/pgil_datasets/authors/e/Egerton,G/life.htm
22. ↑ See White, Terence de Vere. Interspersed Commentary. A Leaf from the Yellow Book: The Correspondence of George Egerton. London: Richards, 1958.
23. ↑ Lorna Sage, Germaine Greer, Elaine Showalter (eds.): The Cambridge guide to women's writing in English. Cambridge University Press 1999, ISBN 0-521-66813-1 , p. 216.