George Egerton’s Scandinavian Breakthrough

Abstract

This chapter brings to light George Egerton’s role as a key mediator of Scandinavian literature. In her most famous collections of short stories, Keynotes (1893) and Discords (1894), Egerton used Scandinavian settings in order to portray women’s experience of international mobility, drawing attention to the importance of gender in the construction of cosmopolitan identities. After the success of her early works, Egerton produced pioneering English translations of works by Norwegian future Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun and Swedish decadent Ola Hansson. Egerton practised literary translation as a form of creative collaboration and used it to advocate Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Egerton’s involvement in the aborted ‘Northern Light’ series, a venture planned by the influential progressive publisher John Lane in order to bring modern Scandinavian literature to English readers.