"George Egerton" is the pseudonym of Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright, who took the name from her husband, George Egerton Clairmonte. Egerton's short fiction is scarcely known today, but her first volume, Keynotes (1893), engendered both extravagant contemporary praise and condemnation. With their ornate prose and echoes of Walter Pater's notions that art should capture exquisite moments as they pass away, Keynotes and Egerton's subsequent volumes, Discords (1894) and Symphonies (1897), reflect characteristic narrative practices of the fin de siècle period and the Decadents. With their attention toward the intense emotions, unconventional attitudes, and frankly sexual experiences of women characters, these collections of short fiction appealed to advocates of the "New Woman" and the woman-suffrage movement. Most late-twentieth-century critics comment on the dated quality of Egerton's fiction; Terence de Vere White goes so far as to say that "a recurring and dated archness is its most depressing feature." Other critics...