Keynotes from Millstreet, Co.Cork: George Egerton's transgressive fictions

IN TANDEM WITH the stirrings of first-wave feminism, the literary work of "New Woman"l writers came to the fore in the early 1890s. Replacing the Victorian "angel in the house", these writers depicted desires never realised in fiction before, and imagined worlds quite different from bourgeois patriarchy. Olive Schreiner's The Story ofan African Farm and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland are well-known examples of this genre today. The principles of this fiction included the abolition of hierarchical systems and an incisive understanding of the workings of ideological process. The triumph of the new woman figure is seen as effecting a liberation of the whole community, and of social relations in general in these fictions.