Unregenerate spirits: the counter-cultural experiments of George Egerton and Elizabeth Bowen.

Monique Wittig, addressing ideological activism and social change at the end of the twentieth century, proposes the Trojan Horse as a model for counter-cultural movements and avant-garde writers: ‘at the time it is produced, any work with a new form operates as a war machine, because its design and its goal is to pulverise the old forms and formal conventions. It is always produced in hostile territory’ (‘The Trojan Horse’, 1992b: 75). The experimental work of Irish writers George Egerton (1860–1945) and Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973) presents a similar ideological challenge to the gender and sexual binaries of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bowen’s life and work is relatively well-known within the canon of both British and Irish literary scholarship but Egerton, on the other hand, is much less well-known and has only recently begun to emerge within the canon of contemporary literary criticism (e.g. Ardis 1990; Showalter 1992; Pykett 1995; Ledger 1997). Focusing on her early fiction, I will consider the ways in which Egerton deployed protagonists who are clearly marked out as exiles, outsiders to the hegemonic order, partly as a means to destabilise that order. I will then move on to the work of Elizabeth Bowen and will contend that in her work, particularly in her 1968 novel, Eva Trout, Bowen extends the blueprint forged by writers such as Egerton.