Introduction

The introduction to this volume offers a biographical overview of Egerton's life and literary career, which continued well beyond her years of active publication (1893-1905), and provides insight into her work as a playwright, translator and mentor of younger authors throughout her life. It is remedial in that it offers corrections to ongoing mistakes in Egerton scholarship, and draws out the themes and issues considered in the essays which form the volume's chapters. It explains the revisionist agendas of the chapters and offers an argument that the works contained within the volume, when viewed as a whole, make the strongest case yet for the reclamation of Egerton's reputation as a literary moderniser, and thus firmly situate her works as among the earliest published documents to chart the path towards literary modernism, to deal in metatextual ways with the systemic abuse that attended the ongoing attempts by literary innovators such as herself to professionalise and elevate the position of the woman writer, and by extension lays the critical groundwork for a more complete restoration of her reputation as a literary pioneer and catalyst for change.