Keynotes

Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright, born Mary Elizabeth Annie Dunne; 14 December 1859 - 12 August 1945, used the pen name, George Egerton. She is regarded as one of the key authors of the late 19th-century New Woman movement. Mary Elizabeth Annie Dunne, afterward known as George Egerton, was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1859. She was a Catholic who attended school in Germany for two years as a teenager. Henry Peter Higginson-Whyte-Melville, who was married at the time, and Egerton eloped in 1888. Her earliest writing endeavors were motivated by her second marriage (in 1891) to the minor explorer Egerton Tertius Clairmonte. Keynotes, Egerton's debut collection of short stories, was released in 1893 by John Lane and Elkin Mathews of the Bodley Head. She was close friends with J. M. Barrie, Ellen Terry, and George Bernard Shaw.