George Egerton
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright (1859 – 1945), better known by her pen name George Egerton, was a British writer and feminist. She wrote Now Spring Has Come based on her encounter with Knut Hamsun in 1890. Egerton also fought for women's independence.
Author of Keynotes (1893), Discords (1894), and The Wheel of God (1898). Widely considered to be one of the most important of the "New Woman" writers of the nineteenth century fin de siecle. Friend of George Bernard Shaw, Ellen Terry, J. M. Barrie.
George Egerton was born Mary Chavelita Dunne in Australia in 1859, to a Welsh protestant mother and Irish Catholic father, Captain John J. Dunne. The earliest years of her life were marked by migration from Australia to New Zealand and Chile, but most of her formative years were spent in and around Dublin, and Egerton was to refer to herself throughout her life as "intensely Irish". Raised an Irish Catholic in a non-bourgeios family, she was schooled for two years in Germany as a teenager. There, she demonstrated a talent for art and linguistics. She would eventually learn to speak a variety of languages fluently, including German, French, Norwegian, Swedish, Russian and French.
Her emigration to New York when she was in her early twenties was an attempt to support her increasingly destitute father and younger siblings.
Following her return from America, she became the traveling companion of a Mrs. Whyte-Melville, widow of the author, who was at the time remarried to Henry Higginson, one of Egerton's father's friends. When Egerton and Higginson subsequently eloped to Norway, newspaper accounts suggested that not only was Higginson married to Mrs. Melville, but that he had two wives - never, according to accounts at the time, having legally divorced his first wife.
Egerton spent two years in Norway with Higginson until his death. These were formative years for her in terms of her intellectual growth, and while in Norway she was introduced to the work of Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Ola Hansson, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Knut Hamsun, with whom she would later have a brief romance which would serve as the inspiration for her 1893 short story "Now Spring Has Come". She later met and married Egerton Tertius Clairmonte. Clairmonte was penniless and Egerton's first attempts at writing fiction came during this marriage and as a result of their financial difficulties. She chose the pseudonym "George Egerton" in part as a tribute to her mother, whose maiden name was "George", and in part for her husband.
Egerton's first book of short stories, Keynotes, was published by John Lane and Elkin Mathews of the Bodley Head in 1893. It was an immediate success on both sides of the Atlantic. The Bodley Head would later go on to publish a Keynotes series of books, named after Egerton's first volume, in hopes of emulating its success.
Keynotes was the high-water mark of Egerton's literary career. A subsequent volume of short stories, Discords, did not sell as well as her first, and her later efforts included the short story volumes Symphonies and Flies in Amber, as well as two novels, Rosa Amorosa and The Wheel of God, and a book of Nietzschean parables, Fantasias. None of her succeeding volumes met with commercial success, and later attempts at writing plays, including 1925's Camilla States Her Case, also met largely with failure.
Egerton is often considered today in terms of her relationship to the British "New Woman" movement in literature. Her stylistic innovations, often termed "proto-modernist" by literary scholars, and her often radical subject matter have ensured that her fiction continues to be studied at the university level in America and Britain.
The first mention of Friedrich Nietzsche in English literature ostensibly occurs in George Egerton's Keynotes in 1893, three years before any of Nietzsche's works was translated into English.
She divorced Egerton Clairmonte in 1901 and married the dramatic agent Reginald Golding Bright, fifteen years her junior, to whom she remained married until his death in the 1940s. She died in 1945 in London. Her cousin Terence De Vere White collected her letters and his reminiscences of her and published them in 1958 as A Leaf from the Yellow Book.
Asked how to say her pen name, she told The Literary Digest it was pronounced edg'er-ton, adding "This name is pronounced this way, as far as I know by all bearers of the name in England." (Charles Earle Funk, What's the Name, Please?, Funk & Wagnalls, 1936.)
