Keynotes

by George Egerton

Contents:

A CROSS LINE

NOW SPRING HAS COME

THE SPELL OF THE WHITE ELF

A LITTLE GREY GLOVE

AN EMPTY FRAME

UNDER NORTHERN SKY
I. How Marie Larsen Exorcised a Demon
II. A Shadow's Slant
III. An Ebb Tide

An excerpt from the beginning of:

A CROSS LINE


The rather flat notes of a man's voice float out into the clear air, singing the refrain of a popular music-hall ditty. There is something incongruous between the melody and the surroundings. It seems profane, indelicate, to bring this slangy, vulgar tune, and with it the mental picture of footlight flare and fantastic dance into the lovely freshness of this perfect spring day.

A woman sitting on a felled tree turns her head to meet its coming, and an expression flits across her face in which disgust and humorous appreciation are subtly blended. Her mind is nothing if not picturesque; her busy brain, with all its capabilities choked by a thousand vagrant fancies, is always producing pictures and finding associations between the most unlikely objects. She has been reading a little sketch written in the daintiest language of a fountain scene in Tanagra, and her vivid imagination has made it real to her. The slim, graceful maids grouped around it filling their exquisitely-formed earthen jars, the dainty poise of their classic heads, and the flowing folds of their draperies have been actually present with her; and now?—why, it is like the entrance of a half-tipsy vagabond player bedizened in tawdry finery—the picture is blurred. She rests her head against the trunk of a pine tree behind her, and awaits the singer. She is sitting on an incline in the midst of a wilderness of trees; some have blown down, some have been cut down, and the lopped branches lie about; moss and bracken and trailing bramble, fir-cones, wild rose bushes, and speckled red ' fairy hats' fight for life in wild confusion. A disused quarry to the left is an ideal haunt of pike, and to the right a little river rushes along in haste to join a greater sister that is fighting a troubled way to the sea. A row of stepping-stones crosses it, and if you were to stand on one you would see shoals of restless stone loach ' Beardies' darting from side to side. The tails of several ducks can be seen above the water, and the paddle of their balancing feet, and the gurgling suction of their bills as they search for larvæ can be heard distinctly between the hum of insect, twitter of bird, and rustle of stream and leaf. The singer has changed his lay to a whistle, and presently he comes down the path a cool, neat, grey-clad f1gure, with a fishing creel slung across his back, and a trout rod held on his shoulder. The air ceases abruptly, and his cold grey eyes scan the seated figure with its gipsy ease of attitude, a scarlet shawl that has fallen from her shoulders forming an accentuative background to the slim roundness of her waist.

Persistent study, coupled with a varied experience of the female animal, has given the owner of the grey eyes some facility in classing her, although it has not supplied him with any definite data as to what any one of the species may do in a given circumstance. To put it in his own words, in answer to a friend who chaffed him on his untiring pursuit of women as an interesting problem :

' If a fellow has had much experience of his fellow-man he may divide him into types, and, given a certain number of men and a certain number of circumstances, he is pretty safe on hitting on the line of action each type will strike; 't aint so with woman. 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.

Genres: Classics, Ebooks, Womens

200 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1893

About the author

Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright (born Mary Elizabeth Annie Dunne; 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. Widely considered to be one of the most important of the "New Woman" writers of the nineteenth century fin de siecle, she was a friend of George Bernard Shaw, Ellen Terry and J.M. Barrie.

Egerton's stylistic innovations, often termed "proto-modernist" by literary scholars, and her often radical and feminist subject matter[4] have ensured that her fiction continues to generate academic interest in America and Britain. Egerton's experimentation with form and content anticipated the high modernism of writers like James Joyce and D H Lawrence, and Egerton's The Wheel of God often reads as a sort of rudimentary template for Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Thomas Hardy acknowledged the influence of Egerton's work on his own, in particular on the construction of his "New Woman" character, Sue Bridehead, in Jude the Obscure. Perhaps most notably, Holbrook Jackson credits Egerton with the first mention of Friedrich Nietzsche in English literature (she refers to Nietzsche in Keynotes in 1893, three years before the first of Nietzsche's works was translated into English).

Reviews

[Jasmine A. N. · Rating 2 out of 5]

I genuinely feel so bad for rating this so low because it honestly was not bad. It had great messages and themes, and there were lines here and there that really did hit. But I think I’m just generally not a fan of this modernist style of writing. I can see why people would compare this to Woolf; the writing is indeed very stream-of-conscious, and, in my opinion, very tedious and long-winded. It’s full of long paragraphs with, again, in my opinion, very repetitive and unimportant descriptions. As I was reading, all I was wondering was ‘Why? Why? I do not see the point?’ I felt like the writing really detracted from the whole message, but it could just be that I do not understand modernist literature. I was really going to give this the benefit of the doubt, but I got to the last part and was at a point where I flipped to the next page to see how much longer this would go and when I realised it was more and more of that tedious descriptive writing, I legitimately grunted and found myself very annoyed. Is it dramatic to say I was on the verge of tears? But I basically skimmed through it all after that. Overall, the stories didn’t really have the cohesion I like to see in more contemporary works but I’ll blame that on the times. The first and fourth stories were probably my favourites (and by that I feel only neutral about them, perhaps a little thoughtfulness, only a little), but otherwise my net feelings for the collection were negative. If you like modern literature, akin to Woolf, you may like this(?) but it’s not for the likes of folks like me.

[Sam Oxford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very tangential stories, focused largely on psychological realism/internal monologue from a woman's perspective, but when they hit they hit hard.

Favorite Stories were A Cross Line, Now Spring has Come, and A Little Grey Glove.

[Karlie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Early feminism is familiar and yet hard to understand. It’s like looking into a box and vaguely recognizing the contents. I need to understand more on Victorian culture in order fully take in more of a his kind of feminism.

[Lily Magoon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely phenomenal. It's incredibly nuanced, even when you don't consider the state of feminism at the time it was written

[rhian]

(Only read one story from this I think )

[Katie Brock · Rating 3 out of 5]

A short story collection that focuses on love with the woman taking the forefront. There is a really good focus on women’s sexuality without making them out to be dominating. I really enjoyed the stories but at one point I didn’t realise they were short stories until the narration changed from third to first person.

I enjoyed it