of 1888. The marriage lasted until his death a year later. With Whyte-Melville, Egerton moved to Norway, where she lived for two years. This time spent in Norway was formative to her in terms of her intellectual growth and artistic development. While in Norway she immersed herself in the work of Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Ola Hansson, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Knut Hamsun. Her brief romantic connection to Hamsun served as the inspiration for her 1893 short story "Now Spring Has Come". Hamsun went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and Egerton was the first to make Hamsun's work accessible to an English readership, with her translation of his first novel Hunger (Sult), published in 1899. A second marriage (in 1891) to the minor adventurer and author Egerton Tertius Clairmonte was the impetus for her first attempts at writing fiction – instigated by his penniless status and her desire to alleviate the boredom she felt upon her return to rural Ireland. She chose the pseudonym "George Egerton" as a tribute to both her mother and to Clairmonte. Asked how to say her pen name, she told The Literary Digest it was pronounced edg'er-ton, adding "This name is pronounced this way, as far as I know by all bearers of the name in England." Literary career Egerton's first book of short stories, Keynotes, was published by John Lane and Elkin Mathews of the Bodley Head in 1893 and illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley. Like other Bodley Head and Beardsley-illustrated publications, it is associated with both the literary fin de siècle and "Decadent" movements. Keynotes was phenomenally successful (and notorious) on both sides of the Atlantic and as a result of this Egerton became a celebrity, was interviewed in the leading magazines of the day, and was famously lampooned in Punch. Keynotes and her subsequent fiction often had the same thematic preoccupation: a dismissal of female purity as a male construct that denies women the right to expect and experience sexual freedom and fulfilment. Commentators long felt that Keynotes was the high-water mark of Egerton's literary career, but a renewed interest in her later work gained momentum in the first decade of the twenty-first century and has continued apace. As a result, recent academic scholarship has increasingly focused on her subsequent volume of short stories, Discords, and her later efforts – including two additional short story volumes (Symphonies and Flies in Amber);