Egerton, George (Mary Chavelita Dunne ) (1859–1945), writer, was born 14 December 1859 in Melbourne, Australia, eldest daughter among three daughters and one son of Capt. John Joseph Dunne (1837–1910), native of Queen's Co. (Laois), Ireland, army officer, author, artist, sportsman, and secretary of the home rule association, and Isabel Dunne (née George-Bynon), from Glamorganshire, Wales. As a child she travelled widely, possibly living for a time in Chile before settling in Ireland where she received a private catholic education. Circumstances surrounding the break-up of the family after the death of her mother when she was 14 forced her to suppress early aspirations to become an artist. After training to become a nurse in London, she worked two years in New York in a variety of low-paid jobs, then returned to England. Her later autobiographical novel The wheel of God (1898) provides an insight into this period of her life.
She married three times, first in 1888 to Henry Higginson (aka H. H. W. Melville), a married man and bigamist, with whom she eloped to Norway. Learning the language, she became enamoured with Ibsenism and the Scandinavian realists, as evidenced in her later work. The marriage failed after only a year owing to her husband's alcoholism and his brutish treatment of her. She met the novelist Knut Hamsun, and on her return to London in 1890 began a translation (published in 1899) of his novel Hunger; she later dedicated her first book to him. She worked in the British Museum, and spent considerable time in Ireland. In 1891 she married secondly George Egerton Clairmonte, a minor novelist whose name she later took as her pseudonym. Increasingly short of money, they moved to Ireland where she began to write short stories to support them. Determined to write about woman from her own perspective, and not as man would have her represented, she distinguished herself with her first and most sensational work, Keynotes (1893), a collection of short stories, regarded as the first appearance of the so-called ‘new woman’, an embryonic form of feminism, in English-language fiction. Both this and subsequent works reveal the influences of the European novel. The three short-story collections that followed – Discords (1894), Symphonies (1897), and Fantasias (1898) – sought to equate marriage with a form of ‘legal prostitution’; none equalled her first success. These, together with a volume of love letters, Rosa amorosa (1901), and other of her works, evidence a reworking of the same thematic preoccupation: a dismissal of female ‘purity’ as a male construct that denies women the right to expect and experience sexual freedom and fulfilment. Her candid revelations horrified conservative critics, and her vision of sexual and social egalitarianism ultimately proved too advanced for her environment. Nevertheless, she played a significant role in redefining the parameters of permissible subject matter for women writers and readers.
It is thought that after her premier success she had sexual liaisons with various men on the literary scene, including her publisher, Tom Lane. The relationship with her second husband broke down shortly after the birth of their only son in 1895, and they divorced in 1901. In the latter year she married thirdly Reginald Golding Bright (d. 1941), a leading theatrical agent fifteen years her junior. She herself became a literary agent to George Bernard Shaw (qv), Somerset Maugham, and others. Until 1925 she wrote and adapted works for the theatre, but those that reached the stage, such as ‘His wife's family’ (1909) and ‘Camilla states her case’ (1925), were jeered by audiences and derided by critics. She died on 12 August 1945 at her home at Ifield Park, Crawley, Sussex. Her letters and diaries were edited by her cousin Terence de Vere White (qv) as A leaf from the yellow book (1958), which also contains a portrait photograph of her.