A Millstreet Love Story

The latest from the Aubane Historical Society is unusual in that it is a love story set in Millstreet and written in 1905 by one of the best known writers of the day, George Egerton. It is called “The Marriage of Mary Ascension.”

Egerton was in fact a woman, Mary Dunne, who had lived in a cottage named ‘Ardrath’ near Millstreet for some time (1892-1894), and the story is based on her experiences here. It is an unsparing account of the town and some people in it.

It is interesting in a number of ways. Among other things she suggests that the town had a previous Gaelic name that meant “the little town in the lap of the hills.”

It is currently available from Wordsworth in the Square and other outlets for €5.

As well as the story The Marriage of Mary Ascension, the booklet also has a superb analysis of Egerton, and her writing in the context of Millstreet and her view of the people in the area at the time.

The introduction of the book Keynotes & Discords  gives much broader description of her whole life, her marriages, her travelling, and how her ground breaking writings were acclaimed and revulsed at the same time. With regard to Millstreet is still short of what is contained in the new booklet by the Aubane Historical Society, but it does contains this short piece ^[1] :
“… In 1889 she married a man as irresponsible and improvident as her father, a young Canadian novelist called George Egerton Clairmonte.  In 1892 they settled in Millstreet, County Cork where they were perennially short of money. Egerton’s first foray into the writing of fiction, which would lead to the dazzling success of ‘Keynotes’, was undertaken in an attempt to write her way out of quite serious financial embarrassment.
The collection of short stories that would become Keynotes was produced in an astonishing burst of creative energy. “Inside ten days I wrote six stories and sent them to TP’s Weekly”, she later recounted. TP Gill assumed them to be the work of a man (she had signed the ‘Ardrath’, the name of the cottage where she lived in Millstreet) and though them rather ‘strong’. Commenting on the ‘Scandavian’ cast of thought in the stories, he enquired as to whether she might be able to ‘say what you want’ without these ‘appeals to the sexual sense’? He objected to a scene …
… The immediate success of Keynotes did not at first lead to Egerton’s departure from County Cork to London. O’Toole surmises that it remained cheaper for her to live in County Cork, where Clairmonte, her spend-thrift husband, was less likely to run up further debts than would be the case in the metropolis. But she did finally move to the English capital in 1894 with the publication of her second collection of short stories, Discords….”

You can also read most of the the first short story in Keynotes called A Cross Line online at the same place as the introduction above. Here is a sample ^[2]:

One quivering, gleaming, daring bound, and she stands with out-stretched arms and passion-filled eyes, poised on one slender foot, asking a supreme note to finish her dream in motion. And the men raise to a man and answer her, and cheer, cheer, tilll the echoes shout from the surrounding hills and tumble wildly away down the crags. The clouds have sailed away, leaving long feathery streaks in their wake. Her eyes have an inseeing look, and she is tremulous with excitement

Keynotes sold over 6000 copies in its first year alone, was translated into seven languages and had run through eight printings by 1898.

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It is well worth the small sum of €5 for this insight into the life and people in Millstreet at the end of the nineteenth century.

With thanks to the Aubane Historical Society for informing us of their newest publication.

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^{[1] Taken from Keynotes & Discords, pages x & xi of the introduction}

^{[2] Taken from Keynotes & Discords, pages xxiii of the introduction}

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Keynotes from Millstreet, Co. Cork: George Egerton’s Transgressive Fictions by Tina O’Toole – … George Egerton’s Keynotes collection, published in 1893, was central to this fin de siecle feminist campaign. This essay looks at her career, and asks why her work has been almost completely erased from literary history. Those critics who have attempted to uncover her influence, moreover, tend to neglect any consideration of the effect of her Irishness on the material. I will examine Egerton’s use of her Irishness, her “outsider” status, as a subversive tool to disrupt the ideological matrix, holding both women and men in place during the Victorian period. Situating her work in the wider context offin de siecle fiction, I will also investigate Egerton’s experiments with form, and will argue that they contribute to an early feminist, modernist aesthetic…

 

 

2. Iconic 1893 short story collection, Keynotes, by George Egerton [Chavelita Dunne]: critically-acclaimed, best-selling, lent title to a Bodley Head series, spawned a Punch cartoon. Not bad for a book written in a railway cottage in Millstreet, Co. Cork. #ReadIrishWomenChallenge pic.twitter.com/tu1McNRtPQ

— Dr Tina O'Toole (@isdoighliom) April 2, 2019