George Egerton

George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright)
Cover of Egerton's first short story collection with cover art by Aubrey Beardsley.
Born	(1859-12-14)14 December 1859 Melbourne, Australia
Died	12 August 1945(1945-08-12) (aged 85) Sussex, United Kingdom
Occupation	Writer

Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright (14 December 1859 – 12 August 1945), better known by her pen name George Egerton, (pronounced Edg'er-ton) was a New Woman writer and feminist. Egerton is widely considered to be one of the most important of the "New Woman" writers of the nineteenth century fin de siècle, although she was herself "embarrassed" by this connection in her lifetime and was opposed to the suffrage movement. She was a friend of George Bernard Shaw, Ellen Terry and J. M. Barrie.

George Egerton was born Mary Chavelita Dunne in Melbourne, Australia in 1859, to a Welsh Protestant mother, Isabel George, and an Irish Catholic father, Captain John J. Dunne. The earliest years of her life were marked by migration between Australia, New Zealand and Chile, but most of her formative years were spent in and around Dublin, and Egerton was to refer to herself throughout her life as "intensely Irish". Raised Catholic, she was schooled for two years in Germany as a teenager. There, she demonstrated a talent for art and linguistics. Her ambitions to become an artist had to be shelved after the death of her mother when she was fourteen, and she trained as a nurse.

As a young adult, Egerton spent two years in New York. She later spent two years in Norway with Henry Higginson, a married man with whom she had eloped, whom she married in 1888. The marriage lasted only one year. 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 served as the inspiration for her 1893 short story "Now Spring Has Come". Hamsun went 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), published in 1899. A second marriage (in 1891) to minor novelist 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."