Bio: Laura Chilcoat is a Senior at Western Washington University. She plans on attending graduate school and wants to teach Victorian literature.

“The New Woman Short Story:
George Egerton and “A Cross Line”
By Laura Chilcoat

The works of George Egerton have been neglected for much of the twentieth century. This is because until recently the New Woman movement in literature has been virtually ignored. While recent work has sought to remedy this, the focus of modern criticism of New Woman fiction has been on novels. I will begin the work of looking at the short stories of the New Women, focusing especially on George Egerton and her short story “A Cross Line.” Among New Women scholars, George Egerton is often referenced to highlight the talent of the New Woman. However, she is rarely the focus of criticism as most analysis has been predominately on the New Women novel. Other mediums, such as the short story, have not received critical attention from modern feminist critics. I believe that the medium of the short story allowed Egerton to do things that New Woman novels could not accomplish. In this essay, I will argue that understanding George Egerton as a New Woman will  help in appreciating the unique ways she expressed her ideals.  I will also assert that in “A Cross Line,” she used themes from the Decadent movement to emphasize her New Woman values. Finally I will focus on the way that the medium of the short story shaped the ideas expressed in George Egerton's fiction.
The New Woman movement was a late Victorian feminist literary movement that dealt with the changing ideas of femininity and women's place in society. Some common themes in New Woman fiction are concerns over marriage, motherhood, and sexuality.  These concerns were broached in many different ways by the New Woman. Some New Women propounded motherhood outside of marriage, some were for motherhood as a revolutionary way to teach society, and some saw bearing children as hampering their own career aspirations.
George Egerton was born in Australia in 1859 as Mary Chavelita Dunne; her pen name, George Egerton, is from her second husband George Egerton Clairmonte.  Egerton's father was financially unstable, and Egerton left Australia to go to school and work in Europe. From the age of twenty-eight on she seems to have been almost continually in one romantic entanglement or another. Her first pseudo-marriage was to a man named Henry Higginson. They lived together in Norway for two years until his death in 1889. Higginson was an abusive alcoholic and is probably responsible for at least some of Egerton’s disillusionment towards marriage. It is at this time that she was introduced to the Nordic literature that would shape her own fiction. In addition to several enigmatic “flirtations,” she married two more times in her life. Her last marriage was to Reginald Golding Bright in 1901, and they remained married until his death in 1941.
It is no wonder that she portrayed marriage in a negative light after her first two experiences with it. George Egerton’s goals of writing were not to undermine the institution of marriage, but rather to look into impact it has on the souls of women. Looking retrospectively on her short story collection Keynotes, she writes: “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 to tell: the terra incognita of herself, as she knew herself to be, not as man had imagined her.” (qtd. Showalter 211). We see that Egerton’s goals are to understand the reality of women more completely. She looks at how repression negatively affected women, but also how they used it for their own ends.
Egerton's “A Cross Line” deals with many of these themes. The story is ostensibly about a dissatisfied woman who has an affair (we are not told whether it is physical as well as emotional), yet gives up the affair when she realizes she is pregnant. The protagonist seems repelled by the idea of motherhood, yet she resigns herself to it when she learns she is pregnant. Her husband shows the protagonist newly-hatched baby chicks, and he is delighted by their smallness in infancy. The protagonist, on the other hand, “suppresses an exclamation of disgust,” (11). We can see in this scene that the woman has an aversion to babies. After realizing she is pregnant, her first reaction is to “[bury] her face in her hands” (20). Her reaction is a negative one as it is this moment that she realizes that she must give up her lover and her hope of living any life where she is at all understood.
The lack of happiness of the woman in marriage does not stem from her husband’s lack of love in this short story. While the audience can see that the man does appear to love her, he does so in a quiet everyday way. This is not what the protagonist claims that women want: “A woman doesn’t care a fig for a love as deep as the death-sea and as silent, she wants something that tells her it in little waves all the time. It isn’t the love, you know, it’s the being loved; it isn’t really the man, it’s his loving!” (14). Between this statement and the protagonist’s clear ambivalence towards her husband, we can see that Egerton is showing marriage to be an institution that is not necessarily fulfilling or rewarding for women.
The protagonist does seem to find someone who can understand her in her suitor. The first scene between the protagonist and her suitor sets up their relationship, and explains what makes him appealing to the protagonist. In the first encounter we learn the suitor’s explanation of why he pursues women:  “You may always look out for the unexpected; she generally upsets a fellow’s calculations, and you are never safe in laying odds on her” (9) In the protagonist’s last meeting with this man, they have a conversation in which she says that he does not “misunderstand” her and “[that] is much!” (17). By showing only these two meetings we can see that the thing that she cares most about in this man is his awareness that he cannot fully know her. Unlike most men in this era, he does not assume that women are simple creatures. He keeps his mind open when meeting them, and his lack of stereotyping seems to make him more attractive to the  protagonist, although there is the feeling that the protagonist's true depth cannot be fully known by any man.
In order to describe woman’s depth and changeability Egerton used many sea metaphors. The sea is the one place where even today there remain deep mysteries, so its serves as a useful figure for the female psyche which is displayed to be unknowable in New Woman fiction. As women are beyond men’s knowledge, the sea is beyond human knowledge. In “A Cross Line,” there are continual references to streams, seas, and oceans. When the protagonist fantasizes about dancing wildly and freely in front of an audience, the “salt freshness of an incoming sea seems to fill her nostrils” (15). In her fantasy, she may not necessarily be in the ocean, but her happiness seems to depend on there being some form of water close enough to drift to her nose. When her suitor asks her if she likes the sea, she responds, “I love it, it answers one’s moods,” (18). I think that Egerton is displaying more than just a love of the sea in these scenes. I think that she  is commenting on the changing attitudes that women take up in order to fulfill men’s fantasies of what women ought to be like. The protagonist may be a “modern” woman, but she still feels the effect of the “angel in the house” paradigm which emphasizes the need for women to always be helping others.
While the Decadents and the New Woman have been linked up because of their non-traditional views of gender, the two groups did not have the same gender ideology. In Decadent literature and art, women were often portrayed as being either the evil, monstrous “femme fatal,” or weak and frail mad-women in Ophelia’s image. Because of the Decadents' tendency to contribute to the negative public image of women, they tended to be at odds with the New Woman. However, Egerton had many ties with the Decadent movement at the fin de siècle, and adopted some of their style. When Egerton's book of short stories, Keynotes, came out it was very successful and gained her respect among the Decadents. Aubrey Beardsley even created the cover art for Keynotes. It is done in usual Beardsley fashion, and features a woman who is stroking an umbrella suggestively and whose left hand is placed sexually among the folds of her dress.  Even before the publication of Keynotes,  Egerton had stories published in the Yellow Book, a prominent Decadent magazine. John Lane, the editor of the Yellow Book, also published Keynotes and Discords. She and Lane were romantically entangled, although it ended badly like most of Egerton’s relationships. Her interaction with the Decadents entered into her writing as well, especially their ideas on the moment.
Arthur Symons, in his 1893 essay “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” looks at the element of the moment that is intrinsic to the Decadents: “[It] is a desperate endeavor to give sensation, to flash the impression of the moment, to preserve the very heat and motion of life,” (1407). The Decadents wanted to be able to precisely get at the emotion and reality of a single moment. They saw life as a series of moments, and they wanted to fully understand the underlying truth that can only be examined in the moment. Egerton also focuses on this importance of the moment in her short stories.
This Decadent emphasis on the moment can be seen in “A Cross Line.” The protagonist, whose name we never learn, has spent her life as a series of moments. When her suitor asks her about her friends, she replies that while she does not have many in her day-to-day life, there are many people who would be saddened by her death: “I am a creature of moments… Some have chafed at my self-sufficiency and have called me fickle – not understanding that they gave me nothing, and that when I had served them, their moment was ended, and I was to pass on” (emphasis added 17). In this seemingly simple statement we can see the New Woman’s dissatisfaction with her place, as well as the Decadents’ emphasis on the importance of the moment. This woman serves others selflessly, and has been called fickle for her attention only in times of distress. This story is told as a series of moments, just as the main character lives them. In this passage the  protagonist is espousing her moment-driven world view.
In her pursuit of understanding woman fully, Egerton uses devices such as stream of consciousness, and the Decadents’ moment. According to Carolyn Christensen Nelson, Egerton:
“[Subordinates] plot to focus instead on impressions, moments of time, and psychological states…Egerton is interested in revealing women’s ambitions, desires, and dreams, and she does that by deliberately sacrificing the narrative line of a tightly plotted story.” (Nelson 3). These devices are extremely effective in getting to understand women’s thinking. Yet, they are ones which could not realistically be used in a novel. No one would read hundreds of pages with only being told the name of a small side character. Nor would nineteenth century readers have been satisfied with the vague ambiguous endings that can be utilized in the short story. While we know that the protagonist turned down her suitor’s request to continue the affair in “A Cross Line;” we do not know how she managed to remain married to a man who could not begin to understand her true depths.
Egerton’s stories not only feature modern women, they are also written in a modern form. An article on the short story by Amarendra Kumar asserts that the “modern” form of the short story came into being at the end of the nineteenth century. Novels were a mainstream medium by this time; however short stories were a different matter: “For the suppressed self and the fantasy born out of it, the short story is a perfect vehicle, which ‘suggests that which cannot normally be said’” (Kumar 2). By placing the short story historically, as a marginal form which “suggests that which cannot normally be said,” we can see how New Woman authors would be attracted to using this type of fiction. Looking at Hanson’s theory of the purpose of short-story writing, we might be looking at a paragraph about New Women fiction.
We can gain more insight into Egerton’s works by looking at an essay from the nineteenth century focusing on the short story. The Philosophy of the Short-Story is a book published in 1901, from an essay originally printed in Lippincott’s Magazine in 1885. In it, Brander Matthews takes up the task of identifying what the difference is between the novel and the short-story: “A true Short-story is something other and something more than a mere story which is short. A true Short-story differs from the Novel chiefly in its essential unity of impression. In a far more exact and precise use of the word, a Short-story has unity as a Novel cannot have it” (15). What Matthews intends to say by this, is that a short story has no pauses or chapter breaks as a novel must. The entire story is told succinctly and entirely, in an amount of space that the reader can consume in one sitting. Thus there are literally no breaks internally or externally, in  Matthew’s mind.
With this nineteenth century viewpoint in mind, I think we can see both the elements of modernity and the New Woman in Egerton’s writing. First of all, there are breaks in “A Cross Line;” as only a few events are told over what seems to be a few months, breaks are made necessary. While background information could reasonably be provided in “A Cross Line,” it is perfect in its current form.  I also think that Matthew’s use of the word “impression” is interesting in regards to Symons’s thoughts on Decadent writing. The impression of the moment and the impression of a story are exactly what we get with Egerton. Everything in “A Cross Line” is alluded to; her affair, her pregnancy, her “modern” thinking are all subtly referred to in no uncertain terms. The dissatisfaction in marriage that the protagonist feels is put in the same scene where she initiates sex with her husband. This one moment in the story manages to get across both  the New Woman’s preoccupation with disappointing marriages and her sexual liberty. Once again, the short story is the best possible medium for looking at different circumstances in which different women find themselves. Some marriages are merely unsatisfying, as in “A Cross Line,” and some are completely abhorrent in their sexual degradation, as in Egerton’s “Virgin Soil.” Also, with the short story, Egerton can refrain from naming her characters, resulting in the insinuation that this is not a singular case; she may be any woman.
By using the short story, Egerton was able to cover many more themes and stories of the New Woman than she would have been able to in novels. Short stories allowed her to focus both on the magnitude of singular moments in people’s lives, and on woman’s identity and nature in these moments. According to Anita Moss, Wendell Harris “credits [Egerton] with being the first writer of short fiction to eliminate all background exposition of characters’ situations, as well as the first to infuse realism with poetic imagination and fantasy” (Moss). If Egerton wrote novels instead of short stories, she would not have been able to ignore the entire back-story of her characters. Readers of novels have certain expectations which are not compatible with ambiguous endings or the exclusion of back-story.
In “A Cross Line,” Egerton uses the short story device of omission; she only alludes to the affair that is the basis of the plot.  Egerton only focuses on the first, and presumably, last meeting of the “lovers.” This is something she would not be able to do in a conventional novel. An audience would expect to know their relationship, as well as the content of their other conversations, and what aspects of their lives were shared. By showing only these two scenes we see what is most important in their interaction. Their relationship is condensed into two significant moments.
By examining “A Cross Line,” we can see the themes of New Woman novels and Decadent philosophies being created. Also, by looking at it in the context of a short-story we can see the different things Egerton can accomplish in this form. Egerton has successfully managed to mingle Decadent and New Woman themes and ideas. Hopefully more criticism will continue to focus on New Woman fiction in all of its different forms. There is so much going on in each work of the New Woman genre that it is vastly more useful to look at them in the context of their form. New Woman short fiction has only been looked at recently, and to consolidate short stories with the form of the novel for criticism is to ignore the different ways form affects style. I hope that more work will be done regarding style and genre within New Woman fiction in the future.

Sources:
Egerton, George. “A Cross Line.” A New Woman Reader: Fiction, Articles, and Drama of the 1890’s. Ed. Carolyn Christensen Nelson. Toronto: Broadview Press, 2001. 8-22.
Kumar, Amarendra. “The Short Story and the Ballad: Perspective of Form.” British Authors and Texts: Critical Responses. Ed. Dr. Chhote Lal Khatri. New Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 2005. 1-18
Matthews, Brander. The Philosophy of the Short-Story. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1901.
Moss, Anita.“George Egerton.” Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 135: British Short-Fiction Writers, 1880-1914: The Realist Tradition. Ed. William B. Thesing. Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1994. 106-115. Gale, Heiner Library, Bellingham, WA. 25 Oct. 2008. <http://galenet.galegroup.com/>
Nelson, Carolyn Christensen. “Short Stories by New Woman Writers: Introduction,” A New Woman Reader: Fiction, Articles, and Drama of the 1890’s. Ed. Carolyn Christensen Nelson. Toronto: Broadview Press, 2001. 3-6.
Pykett, Lyn. “Women Writing Woman: Nineteenth–Century Representations of Gender and Sexuality.” Women and Literature in Britain 1800-1900. Ed. Joanne Shattock. Cambridge: University Press, 2001. 78-98.
Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.
Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle. New York: Penguin Books, 1990.
Symons, Arthur. “The Decadent Movement in Literature.” The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory. Ed. Thomas J. Collins and Vivienne J. Rundle. Ontario: Broadview Press, 1999.1405 – 1413.