Description:
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title>
<jats:p>Among the so-called »new woman writers« of the 1890s Australianborn George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne) was in her time certainly the most notorious, because the most daring. In her short stories, especially in her two first collections Keynotes (1893) and Discords (1894), which became sensational successes, she explored what she called the terra incognita of the female psyche, i.e. women’s deepest wishes hidden below the conventions of patriarchal Victorian society. With amazing independence of mind Egerton rethought gender roles in sex, marriage, parenthood and work and was almost inevitably led to use stream-of-consciousness technique before Joyce and Woolf. The article evaluates Egerton’s contribution to modernist topics and narrative techniques and pleads for the rediscovery of her work.</jats:p>