Fantasias

Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright (14 December 1859 - 12 August 1945), better known by her pen name George Egerton, was a "New Woman" writer and feminist. Widely considered to be one of the most important of the "New Woman" writers of the nineteenth century fin de siecle, she was a friend of George Bernard Shaw, Ellen Terry and J. M. Barrie.

As a young adult, she emigrated to America and later spent two years in Norway with Henry Higginson, a married man with whom she had eloped. These were formative years for her in terms of her intellectual growth and artistic development. While in Norway she immersed herself in the work of Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Ola Hansson, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Knut Hamsun. Her brief romance with Hamsun serves as the inspiration for her 1893 short story "Now Spring Has Come". Hamsun would go on to win the Nobel prize for literature, and Egerton was the first to make Hamsun's work accessible to an English readership, with her translation of his first novel Hunger (Sult).

A later marriage to Egerton Tertius Clairmonte was the impetus for her first attempts at writing fiction - instigated by his penniless status and her desire to alleviate the boredom she felt upon her return to rural Ireland. She chose the pseudonym "George Egerton" as a tribute to both her mother, whose maiden name was "George", and to Clairmonte. 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."

Egerton's work has, however, stimulated academic debate in recent years, and her reputation has slowly but steadily grown since her work began to be reassessed in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In her seminal feminist work, A Literature of Their Own, Elaine Showalter was among the first to recognize Egerton's contribution to English literature.

This collection of stories may be even greater than its estimated value as Nietzchian fables.