eorge Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne, 1859–1945) published in 1893 a collection of eight interlinked impressionistic and elliptical short stories, Keynotes, which challenged the Victorian views of female sexuality. The publication, consisting of stories titled "A Cross Line", "Now Spring Has Come," "The Spell of the White Elf," "A Little Grey Glove," "An Empty Frame," and "Under Northern Sky" (in three parts: "How Marie Larsen Exorcised a Demon," "A Shadow's Slant," and "An Ebb Tide") became immediately popular, selling 6,000 copies in the first year. Focused on women's emotional and sexual passions, these stories expressed radically different views from the stereotypical ones of their era. Keynotes and the follow-up volume Discords (1894), both characterised by innovative narrative style and aesthetics, can be labelled as the first "modernist" or rather "proto-modernist" short stories in the English language.
Feminine sensibility
In Keynotes Egerton wanted to express feminine sensibility and show that sexuality holds a significant place in women's lives by focusing on the inner consciousness of female protagonists who have discovered that the purity and modesty required of them was a gross Victorian patriarchal trap imposed in order to deny them personal freedom and fulfilment. The book's decadent, turn-of-the-century cover featuring a woman wearing a large hat and carrying a parasol, accompanied by a Pierrot and a jester-like figure playing a guitar with two masks dangling, was created by Aubrey Beardsley, the leading English illustrator of the 1890s, and the work received high degrees of both praise and condemnation. The stories end abruptly, leaving major plot and character development unresolved. Unlike earlier Victorian authors, Egerton does not provide clear answers to problems she raised in her stories. What she tried to express was a sense of a genuine "woman's sensibility," i.e. a reflection of female emotions and the inner self. In her "A Keynote to Keynotes" Egerton admitted:
I realized that in literature, everything had been better done by man than woman could hope to emulate. There was only one small plot left for her to tell: the terra incognita of herself, as she knew herself to be, not as man liked to imagine her. [58]
This opinion prompted her to make in her short stories particular insights into women's psyche which male authors could not offer. Her short stories, written in a peculiar intimate style, shocked both readers and reviewers for their daring portrayals of Victorian women's emotional lives and sexuality.
"A Cross Line"
The volume opens with the most successful story "A Cross Line", which deals with the provocative themes of extra-marital affair, sexuality and motherhood. An unnamed, enigmatic woman while strolling alone meets a grey-eyed man who is looking for a trout stream, but he was misdirected and gives up his search. Unexpectedly they engage in a friendly conversation. They meet casually by the river and continue the odd conversation which sometimes sounds as if they are flirting. The reader learns that the woman is married and apparently pregnant, but she confides in her interlocutor that she is not happy in marriage because her husband does not understand her. After a few casual meetings with the fisherman, the woman admits that he at least does not misunderstand her.
In "A Cross Line" Egerton asserts that women should have the right to make sexual choices and enjoy bodily pleasure. In a charged passage, Egerton describes the rise of the heroine's female consciousness reflected in her veiled erotic fantasies:
She fancies herself in Arabia on the back of a swift steed. Flashing eyes set in dark faces surround her, and she can see the clouds of sand swirl, and feel the swing under her of his rushing stride; and her thoughts shape themselves into a wild song, – a song to her steed of flowing mane and satin skin, an uncouth rhythmical jingle with a feverish beat; a song to the untamed spirit that dwells within her. Then she fancies she is on the stage of an ancient theatre out in the open air, with hundreds of faces upturned towards her. She is gauze-clad in a cobweb garment of wondrous tissue. Her arms are clasped by jewelled snakes, and one with quivering diamond fangs coils round her hips. Her hair floats loosely, and her feet are sandal-clad, with the delicate breath of vines and the salt freshness of an incoming sea seems to fill her nostrils. She bounds forward and dances, bends her lissom waist, and curves her slender arms, and gives to the soul of each man what he craves, be it good or evil. And she can feel now, lying on the shade of Irish hills with her head resting on her scarlet shawl and her eyes closed the grand intoxicating power of swaying all these human souls to wonder and applause. She can see herself with parted lips and panting, rounded breasts, and a dancing devil in each glowing eye, sway voluptuously to the wild music that rises, now slow, now fast, now deliriously wild, seductive, intoxicating, with a human note of passion in its strain. [19–20]
This passage is most revealing about the woman's hidden fantasies. They allow her to explore desires without regard to social constraints and self-consciousness. The passage must have shocked many Victorian readers. The story, however, concludes inconclusively, leaving the reader without a clear sense of message. Egerton's treatment of married life was critical, mostly due to poor communication between spouses, lack of intimacy, emotional distance and loneliness. In "A Cross Line" Egerton rejected the rigid Victorian stereotypes of the "angel in the house" and the "fallen woman," showing her female protagonist as a complex individual who rebels against Victorian-era restrictions confining her solely to the domestic sphere. The woman's final decision to return to her conventional married life should not be seen as her defeat, but as an act of a self-willed decision after the discovery of her pregnancy. Her maternal instincts win over her erotic fantasies and she eventually chooses domesticity and maternity in an unsatisfying marriage.
The Stories that Follow
The second story in the collection, "Now Spring Has Come: A Confidence," deals with another unconventional female protagonist — one who during her stay in Norway is deeply moved by a book she has bought, although the bookseller had warned her: "That is a very bad book, Madam. One of the modern realistic school, a tendenz roman. I would not advise Madam to read it." Nevertheless, fascinated by the book's content, she impulsively arranges to meet the unknown male author and enjoys a long conversation with him. They freely discuss various topics, such as Tolstoy's doctrine of celibacy, Ibsen's feminist play Hedda Gabler and Strindberg's view of the female animal. They both agree that Friedrich Nietzsche "appealed to them immensely." The story reveals the female protagonist's metamorphosis from a conventional Victorian woman to the free-thinking New Woman.
"The Spell of the White Elf" is a story-within-a story which presents similarly individualistic female protagonists who cannot accept the Victorian norms of marriage and motherhood. A married New Woman writer adopts a baby girl, whom she has nicknamed "The White Elf," and raises her with utmost care and genuine motherly love. She awakens in the narrator her own maternal yearning. The adoptive mother challenges the traditional views on motherhood and represents a "new motherhood" which resists patriarchal supremacy.
The only story in the collection written from a man's point of view is the following one, "A Little Grey Glove." Egerton quotes Oscar Wilde in an epigram: "The book of life begins with a man and woman in a garden and ends — with Revelations." Here, the eccentric male narrator happens to meet a recently divorced woman while she is fishing alone in a stream. Almost immediately he becomes infatuated in her. They have a brief and unconsummated relationship. The woman rejects his advances, but promises him to reconsider their relationship if they meet after a year. “I must learn first to think of myself as a free woman again” (121), she tells him. The enamoured narrator hopes that the woman will eventually return. In the meantime, as a solace he carries with him everywhere his fetish – a small grey suede glove which the woman sent him in an envelope before she left:
Next morning the little maid brought me an envelope from the lady who left by the first train. It held a little gray glove. That is why I carry it always, and why I haunt the inn and never leave it for longer than a week; why I sit and dream in the old chair that has a ghost of her presence always, dream of the spring to come with the May-fly on the wing, and the young summer when midges dance, and the trout are growing fastidious; when she will come to me across the meadow grass, through the silver haze, as she did before, – come with her gray eyes shining to exchange herself for her little gray glove. [122]
The glove clearly has a symbolic meaning in the story. Bestowing her glove on the narrator might be interpreted as the woman's promise of future commitment. But she prefers to be independent and elusive, and that is why she promises to take a decision about their relationship only after a year has elapsed. The story, which is a critique of both the institution of marriage and the restrictions imposed on women in the Victorian era, ends with the narrator still waiting for the mysterious woman. As in her other stories, Egerton emphasises the theme of women’s agency and their desire for sexual freedom and fulfilment.
As for marriage itself, the next story, "An Empty Frame," is about a passionless one. Here, the unnamed woman is dissatisfied with her husband due to his insensitivity. Once she received a gift from him: the beautiful but empty frame that gives the story its title; it serves as a metaphor for the wife's void life and her emotionally unfulfilled marriage.
The collection, so resonant at every turn of women's unsatisfactory lives, needs and longings, ends with the trilogy of stories titled "Under Northern Sky" ("How Marie Larsen Exorcised a Demon," "A Shadow's Slant," and "An Ebb Tide"). These confirm Egerton's related themes, as well as revealing her interest in Scandinavian naturalism and psychological realism. All three point the finger of blame at overbearing men. The first, "How Marie Larsen Exorcised a Demon", set on an estate in Norway, deals with a drunken and abusive household tyrant whom Marie Larsen, one of the maidservants, mollifies through the use of soothing storytelling until he falls asleep. In the second part of the trilogy, "A Shadow's Slant," also set on the same estate, Egerton portrays marriage as confinement for women. The story revolves around a brutal and sadistic husband and his victimised wife. The final story, "An Ebb Tide," describes the main character, a disillusioned woman watching the death of her despotic father who was more feared than loved by his household. The title symbolises the end of the obstructive patriarchal influence which restricted women to a subordinate domestic role. In Keynotes Egerton often used Scandinavian settings in order to portray women's troubled inner experiences.
Conclusion
George Egerton's Keynotes is one of the most significant and influential works of Victorian feminist fiction that examined women's psychology and sexuality with unprecedented frankness and challenged the traditional gender stereotypes. In giving an uninhibited voice to women's desires, Egerton's daring portrayals of female sexuality offer an insightful exploration of the "woman question" in late Victorian England. As Sally Ledger says, "Egerton’s articulation of the complex field of gender relations in the late nineteenth century is unrivalled. Coupled with her aesthetic experimentation with the modern short story, an experimentation that forged a new way of expressing women’s experience, Egerton’s status as an important and compelling fin-de-siècle writer is clear" (xxiv). So too is her status as a proponent of the "New Woman" of her age.
Bibliography and Further Reading
Brown, Daniel. "George Egerton's Keynotes: Nietzschean Feminism and Fin-de-Siècle Fetishism." Victorian Literature and Culture 39.1 (2011): 143–66.
Egerton, George. Keynotes. London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1893.
Fluhr, Nicole M. "Figuring the New Woman: Writers and Mothers in George Egerton's Early Stories." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 43.3 (2001): 243–66.
Gawsworth, John, ed. "A Keynote to Keynotes." Ten Contemporaries: Notes Toward Their Definitive Bibliography. London: Ernest Benn, 1932.
Ledger, Sally. The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the fin de siècle. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997.
Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own. British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.
Stetz, Margaret D. "Keynotes: A New Woman, Her Publisher, and Her Material." Studies in the Literary Imagination 30.1 (1997): 89–106.
Created 28 October 2025