1st Edition
George Egerton Terra Incognitas
George Egerton: Terra Incognitas is the first published work to focus solely on Egerton and her literary legacy. It covers the range and extent of Egerton's life and literary career from her emergence into the milieu of London publishing in 1893 to her dramatic works (both original and in translation) and their performance history into the 1920s. This work is an essential addition to ongoing recovery projects and is the first to focus on her 'lost' and unpublished works, mentorship of younger writers, her experiments with characterisations and themes, sociopolitical stances, innovations with form and content, and ultimately, her literary legacy. In doing so, George Egerton: Terra Incognitas reassesses Egerton's broader contribution to fin de siècle and early twentieth-century literature and drama and repositions her as among the most important of the literary innovators of period, and a noteworthy precursor to later female literary modernisers including Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf.
Foreword: - Gerd Karin Bjørhovde, ‘Encountering George Egerton in the Scandinavian Context’
Introduction: – Isobel Sigley and Whitney Standlee
Part 1: Cosmopolitanism and Globalism
1. Peter Sjølyst-Jackson, ‘“A Foreign Element”: George Egerton, Scandinavian Literature and Knut Hamsun’s Hunger’
2. Sravya Bhupatiraju, ‘The Flagrancy of the Flâneuse: George Egerton’s Rejection of the Ideology of Gendered Spheres’
3. Paul March-Russell, ‘Between Nietzsche and Wagner: Egerton’s “Wounded Modernism”’
Part 2: Sexual Identities and Queer Form
4. Heather Marcovitch, ‘George Egerton, John Lane, and Radical Friendship’
5. Niels Caul, ‘The Wheel of God: An Irish Modernist Bildungsroman’
6. Clare Stainthorp, ‘“Love is religion”: Spiritual, Esoteric and Epistolary Connection in Rosa Amorosa’
7. Rachel O’ Nunain, ‘Between Feminism and Conformity: Staging Female Identity in The Backsliders (1911)’
Part 3: Feminist Geopolitics
8. Nathalie Saudo-Welby, ‘“How we women digress”: Modernism, Feminism and Deviation in George Egerton’s short fiction of the 1890s’
9. Whitney Standlee, ‘Medical and Legal Discourse and Varieties of “Unnatural” Parenthood in the Works of George Egerton’
10. Isobel Sigley, ‘The Key Note: Reassessing Egerton’s Short Fiction through Ellen Key’s Concept of “Collective Motherliness”’
11. Éadaoin Regan, ‘“I suppose you are Irish” “Half of me”: An exploration of Irish identity and its role in mental illness in selected works of George Egerton’
Part 4: Influence and Legacy
12. Eleanor Fitzsimons, ‘George Egerton and the Liberation of Irish Women’
Afterword: Margaret D. Stetz, 'The Future of Egerton Studies'
Biography
Isobel Sigley was awarded a PhD in English from Loughborough University in 2023. Her thesis ‘A (New) Woman’s Touch: Tactility and Feminism in Women’s Fin-de-Siecle Short Fiction, 1880-1930’ examines tactility as a form of feminist praxis within women’s short stories of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. She has published work on George Egerton (2021, VPJF) and Alice Dunbar-Nelson (2024, Journal of Medical Humanities), both of whose works were explored alongside work by Sarah Grand, Kate Chopin, Vernon Lee, and Katherine Mansfield within Isobel’s doctoral thesis. Prior to her PhD, Isobel gained an MA in English Literature from Keele University. Isobel first became fascinated by George Egerton when studying for her undergraduate degree at Loughborough University, where the first international conference dedicated to Egerton’s life and works was held in 2017.
Whitney Standlee is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Worcester, and is the author of the monograph Power to Observe: Irish Women Novelists in Britain 1890-1916 (Peter Lang, 2015) and co-editor (with Anna Pilz) of Irish Women’s Writing 1878-1922: Advancing the Cause of Liberty (Manchester University Press, 2016/paperback 2018), both of which include original research on Egerton. A founding member of the Irish Women’s Writing 1880-1920 Network, she and Pilz are also co-originators and editors of two popular series of online interviews for the network. Her most recent publications include a double issue of English Studies co-edited with Laing, Mooney, Ní Bheacháin, Pilz and Stevens entitled Connecting Voices: An Introduction to Irish Women Writers’ Collaborations and Networks, 1880-1940 (2023).
