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 This work is an essential addition to ongoing recovery projects and is the first to focus on her 'lost' and unpublished works, mentorship of younger writers, her experiments with characterisations and themes, sociopolitical stances, innovations with form and content, and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 Hamsuns Hunger
2. Sravya Bhupatiraju, The Flagrancy of the Flâneuse: George Egertons
Rejection of the Ideology of Gendered Spheres
3. Paul March-Russell, Between Nietzsche and Wagner: Egertons 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 Egertons 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 Egertons Short Fiction through
Ellen Keys 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'
Isobel Sigley was awarded a PhD in English from Loughborough University in 2023. Her thesis A (New) Womans Touch: Tactility and Feminism in Womens Fin-de-Siecle Short Fiction, 1880-1930 examines tactility as a form of feminist praxis within womens 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 works by Sarah Grand, Kate Chopin, Vernon Lee and Katherine Mansfield within Isobels 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 Egertons 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 (2015) and co-editor (with Anna Pilz) of Irish Womens Writing 1878-1922: Advancing the Cause of Liberty (2016/paperback 2018), both of which include original research on Egerton. A founding member of the Irish Womens 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).
