GEORGE EGERTON'S KEYNOTES: FOOD AND FEMINISM AT THE FIN DE SIÈCLE

Abstract

First published in 1893, George Egerton's Keynotes was immediately popular, selling six thousand copies in its first year alone. Appearing three years later, Laura Marholm Hansson's review effectively singles out what made the text such a tremendous success: each story offered readers a probing representation of woman's “consciousness” or inner world of emotional and sexual passions, subjects unavailable in any “previous work.” Egerton was, of course, the penname for Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright, and many of the themes covered in Keynotes were loosely modeled after her own life. The volume was uncompromising in its portrayal of women's desires, or those “notes” from which it takes its title. “[T]here are no signs of girlish prudery in ‘Keynotes,’” Hansson continues, “it is a liberal book, indiscreet in respect of the intimacies of married life, and entirely without respect for the husband” (63). Despite this high praise, Hansson also worries whether Keynotes was not “too good a book to become famous all at once” (61). Her hesitation alludes to the mixed reception among readers and literary critics, for to say that everyone loved Egerton's fiction would be an exaggeration and, more importantly, would miss the cultural work of her appetitive characters. As signaled by the second epigraph, taken from Egerton's “Now Spring Has Come,” Keynotes was full of stories focused on “unconventional” women who “hungered” for both food and love; such libidinal desires were unthinkable – and even unspeakable – in a world where the proper Victorian lady was defined in terms of bodily sacrifice. While some readers certainly disapproved, still others like Hansson, as the first epigraph suggests, welcomed this “independent” turn in women's writing and saw in Egerton's characters a reflection of their own “woman's individuality.”