‘EGERTON, George’ (pseud.); Adelbert von HAGEN (translator). Grundtöne. “Keynotes”. Autorisirte Uebersetzung aus dem Englischen … mit dem Portrait der Verfasserin.

The New Woman Goes Global

‘EGERTON, George’ (pseud.); Adelbert von HAGEN (translator). Grundtöne. “Keynotes”. Autorisirte Uebersetzung aus dem Englischen … mit dem Portrait der Verfasserin. Zurich, Erfurt, and Leipzig: Eduard Moos. 1896.

8vo. Publisher’s mauve and pale green boards illustrated by Beardsley, upper board lettered in gilt and black, spine lettered in gilt (gothic letter), yellow patterned endpapers, edges stained red; pp. 192, 48 (advertisements), photographic frontispiece of Egerton with tissue guard, title-page repeating design by Aubrey Beardsley (adapted from first edition of Keynotes), lithographic floral headpieces; corners and spine ends lightly rubbed; sporadic light foxing; a very good copy; 1918 ownership inscription of Elizabeth Laska to front free endpaper.

Very rare third edition, published three months after the first, of the first translation of George Egerton’s Keynotes into German, with a title-page by Beardsley adapted from the first English edition seemingly not present in the first German edition.

Born Mary Elizabeth Annie Dunne (1859–1945), Egerton’s Keynotes was instrumental in shaping the New Woman movement. Enormously popular, it went through six English editions within months of publication and enjoyed similar success in the present German, with three editions in as many months; it was highly esteemed by the Riga-born German biographer of women (often considered a pioneering New Woman herself) and literary critic Laura Marholm, who reviewed the work both in the Frankfurter Zeitung (22 April 1894, predating the work’s appearance in German by two years) and in her Das Buch der Frauen (Six Modern Women): ‘The point on which [Keynotes] differs from all other well-known books by women is the intensity of the awakened consciousness. It follows no pattern and is quite independent of any previous work; it is simply full of a woman’s individuality’ (trans. Brooke Cameron, p. 309).

Marholm’s early introduction of Keynotes to German audiences was known to Egerton: a week after Marholm’s article appeared in the Frankfurter Zeitung, Egerton informed John Lane of the review, which included ‘some very flattering things about the poor little writer’ (quoted in Brown, p. 146); ‘The article was part of a series by Marholm that was subsequently published in 1895 as Das Buch der Frauen, and in English translation by Lane in 1896, where the chapter on Egerton bears the title “Neurotic Keynotes”’ (ibid.).

The first edition was seemingly published without the illustrated boards or the title-page by Beardsley (see the copy at the University of Zurich); all editions bear a prefatory note from Egerton to the translator, in English: ‘Here let me offer you my thanks for your work and the evident liking that prompted you to do it’.

OCLC finds a single copy of any German edition outside continental Europe, at the University of Delaware; not on Library Hub.

See Gertner Zatlin 824; Samuels Lasner 25n.

SKU: 2125434