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Chapter10 el i z a bet h mac l eod wa l l s Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright [George Egerton] (859–945) Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright [George Egerton] seems today to be almost a caricature of the now familiar figure of the short-lived, though profoundly in- fluential, New Woman of the late nineteenth century. Irish, unconventional, and sexually independent, Egerton personified the outsider among English literati —and, indeed, she seemed to cultivate this status. Born Chavelita Dunne to an Irish sailor and his wife in 859, Egerton lived a nomadic existence throughout her young adulthood. Thanks to the financial intervention of her aunts, Egerton was educated in Germany, and worked sporadically on the Continent, in England, and in the United States. In her youth, Egerton lived with a married , Norwegian intellectual who prompted her interest in Ibsen and Nietzsche. The Norwegian died at the height of their affair. Living on a small inheritance bequeathed her by this lover, Egerton gained some financial independence and moved to London, where she soon met and married George Egerton Clairmonte . Having adopted her husband’s name as a pseudonym, Egerton completed Keynotes, her best-known work, while living in Cork County, Ireland; she then marketed the book among London publishers with alacrity and success. Egerton published additional volumes of short stories with less success; bore a child and divorced her philandering husband in 90; married a well-known drama producer, Golding Bright, shortly thereafter; and faded into relative obscurity within only five years of publishing her first volume of stories. Though this brief biographical sketch may seem befitting of the prototypi- 64 | elizabeth macleod walls cal New Woman, Egerton in fact was not a caricature of protofeminist womanhood ; she was, rather, an innovator upon which numerous British women writers from the 890s fashioned their ideologies and public images. Egerton provided an identifiable—in today’s vernacular, “pop cultural”—persona for the so-called New Woman, who was known simultaneously as a particular authorial and fictional type associated with popular fiction in the 880s and 890s. Specifically, New Woman novels offered rhetorical sites in which Victorian women, speaking in the guise of idealistic protagonists, could offer sharp criticisms of marriage, patriarchy, and society often from within the domestic space, thereby developing a pointedly “domestic feminism.” When famed fin-de-siècle publisher John Lane presented Egerton’s first collection of short stories, Keynotes, through his Bodley Head Press, Egerton herself instantly became synonymous with New Womanhood. The book’s appearance in 893 may have presaged the novelist Ouida’s pronunciation of the New Woman as “meet[ing] us at every page of literature written in the English tongue” in 894 (qtd. in Ardis ), but Egerton’s text certainly aided in defining this burgeoning genre of both woman and fiction. For example, the cover of Keynotes was replete with fantastic, utopian images of a woman brandishing the key to her own freedom . In this sense, the volume met all of the criteria by which Lane’s publications are today identified—or, in Talia Schaffer’s words, the text was “published on handmade paper, with an exquisite woodcut for a frontispiece, a stamped gilt design on the cover, special type, in a limited edition, and perhaps with a Beardsley drawing on the cover” (49). Titillated by Aubrey Beardsley’s illustration and Egerton’s frank discussions of the secret side of domesticity (sexuality, adultery, and pregnancy), readers embraced the text and reified Lane’s approach. Thus, Lane began to publish other New Woman writers under the same banner, what became known as his “Keynotes” series, each adorned with the requisite Beardsley woodcut embellished with a highly stylized key. However important Egerton was to establishing the image of New Womanhood , her own fiction ironically represents a departure from the genre of New Woman fiction, much of which is characterized by the dour plight of the domestic feminist. New Woman protagonists are by and large daring and vociferous at first; they explore their own intellectual and artistic capacity; they pursue independence . Yet they almost invariably marry the wrong man and are then consignedtoalifeofquietrebellions .Incontrasttothese“boomerangbooks,”asAnn Ardis has defined their particular plot, Egerton’s collections of short stories— Keynotes, Discords (894), Symphonies (897), and Fantasias (898)—are unique insofar as Egerton’s stories combine elements of tragedy, comedy, fantasy, and sensationalism to create myriad impressions about women’s subjection and sub- [3.133.149.168] Project MUSE...

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