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BOOK REVIEW

George Egerton, The Wheel of God. Vol. 8 of New Woman Fiction, 1881-1899, Part 3. Ed. by Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011. 179 pp. ISBN: 978-1851966431, hbk.

Reviewed by Lena Wånggren.

George Egerton’s novel The Wheel of God (1898) is the penultimate title in Pickering & Chatto’s impressive nine-volume series of New Woman fiction, edited by a range of scholars and under the general editorship of Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton. Egerton (the pen name of Australia-born Mary Chavelita Dunne) is one of the most notorious of the New Woman writers, known best – in her own time and in recent scholarship – for her short stories. These stories, acknowledged for their radical sexual politics and for their “proto-modernist” fragmentary episodic style and narration, have gained much critical attention and been reprinted in various forms. But only now, with Oulton’s series, can we appreciate The Wheel of God in a scholarly edition. Edited by Paul March-Russell, the volume contains a scholarly introduction, a brief bibliography, a chronology of events in Egerton’s life, and explanatory editorial notes.

The three-volume novel itself differs slightly from Egerton’s early short stories, such as those published in her two collections, Keynotes (1893) and Discords (1894). While these earlier proto-modernist short stories, published by John Lane of the Bodley Head, showcase a fragmented style, The Wheel of God relies on a more rounded, unified and more easily flowing narrative. Nonetheless, the work bears the marks characteristic of Egerton’s writing: the narrative gaps and the female protagonist’s introspective stream-of-consciousness-like ponderings. The novel follows Egerton’s heroine, Mary, from childhood to womanhood and from her life in Ireland to her time in New York and in London. Each title of the three volumes reinforces the novel’s theme of Mary’s growth – “The Seed in the Sheath,” “The Blossom in the Bud,” and “The Ripening of the Fruit” – and the unfolding narrative lets Egerton’s audience gain insight to Mary’s thoughts, feelings, and ideas as they develop. Even as a child living alone in Dublin with her sickly mother, Mary contemplates the difference between men’s and women’s places in society, a subject which remains a focus throughout the novel. This very young Mary is determined not to marry when she grows up; instead, the narrator explains, “she would paint, and stay with the mother” (15). However, when her mother dies, Mary, now a young woman, leaves Dublin for New York, where she endures a short-lived struggle working as a secretary before she decides to leave America and go to London.

Mary’s journey presents the reader with spectacular descriptions of fin-de-siècle urban life and its cityscapes, all written in Egerton’s singular and suggestive style. One instance of this particularity is Mary’s impression of New York just after her arrival:

Life seemed less concrete, less inside the houses and warehouses; it was everywhere, pounding like a gigantic steam-hammer, full speed, in the air, in the streets – insistent, noisy, attention-compelling. Trains above one’s head, one caught glimpses of domestic interiors, intimate bedroom scenes, as one whizzed past second stories in the early cars. And one could hear the conductor’s “Hurry up, all aboard!” through the street noises and jingle of the road cars below. (38)

Egerton draws a parallel between the exploration of the urban terrain and her heroine’s changing interior landscape. Mary’s position as flâneuse, expressed in these impressionistic scenes of urban life, provides a real sense of late nineteenth-century modernity in both the Old and the New World – and, perhaps, also of a specifically fin-de-siècle subjectivity. Through Mary’s perception of all that she encounters, the reader is able to take part in her journey from childhood, through adolescence, to adulthood. There are ellipses and gaps in the narrative, highlighted by the narrator: “Mary’s life at this time was too insistent, the mass of material to be observed too diverse to permit of sifting” (86). After going back to London, Mary – despite her earlier intention never to marry – enters two consecutive marriages. The novel ends openly, with the protagonist, after her second husband’s death, retiring to live in the company of other solitary women.  

The Pickering & Chatto text is based on the second edition published by Grant Richards in June 1898; however, this editorial choice is left unexplained. Such justification and a discussion of any textual changes between the first (also 1898) and the second (and possibly other) editions, would have been valuable for those interested in Egerton’s work and in late-century textual studies in general. Unfortunately, the volume completely excludes the rationale and the editions’ differences. Furthermore, too often transcription errors, typographical mistakes, missing spaces or punctuation marks between words disrupt the reader’s absorption with Egerton’s plot and prose. These mistakes easily could have been prevented with more stringent proof-reading. A clearer text and more attention to textual details would have made this volume indispensable for any New Woman scholar. A facsimile of the novel without the typographical mistakes is available on archive.org; however, reading the original edition alongside the scholarly edition would probably be ideal.

Despite those errors in the main text, the volume’s introduction and annotation are indeed excellent. In his introduction, March-Russell discusses the novel in its contemporary social, political, and cultural contexts and gives a keen insight into the fin-de-siècle literary climate. Setting The Wheel of God in the convention of the Bildungsroman and in an emerging modernist tradition, March-Russell sees the novel as an experiment with a well-established literary form (viii). He traces the continuities between Egerton’s earlier and later work, finely arguing for a reconsideration of the novel’s place in Egerton’s collected literary production. March-Russell claims the novel as “the most autobiographical of Egerton’s fictions,” but is eager to stress that it is simultaneously, and more generally, “the most literary and allusive of novels” (x). His careful attention to the text explicates “a network of reference-points, a grid through which Mary’s story is told and through which the reader is forced to navigate” (x). Even in the novel’s opening lines, Egerton provides such a reference-point: the young Mary reading Jane Eyre foreshadows the future unhappy marriage of the adult Mary. March-Russell clearly defines the novel’s intertextual, philosophical and cultural references and fully explains the geographical, historical, and linguistic allusions in his well-informed editorial notes, which thus provide solid information for our full understanding of and pleasure in the text.

Oulton’s series is an excellent initiative and a notable addition to New Woman scholarship. Notwithstanding the typographical flaws in the volume, this reprint of The Wheel of God will enhance and enlarge the field of our study. My hope is that Egerton’s suggestive novel, well worth the attention of general readers and scholars alike, through this new edition, will be given the consideration that it deserves.