two novels (Rosa Amorosa and The Wheel of God); and a book of Nietzschean parables (Fantasias). Her later incarnation as a playwright (Camilla States Her Case, 1925) and translator of plays (most notably from the French) generated only a few moderately successful productions. She was a friend of George Bernard Shaw, Ellen Terry and J. M. Barrie. Politics Egerton's work is among the most forthrightly outspoken in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century English-language literature in terms of a demand for women's education, financial independence, and sexual freedom. Yet, while she was firmly associated with the New Woman movement, Egerton claimed to be "embarrassed" by this reduction of her work. Interestingly, like Emily Lawless, Egerton was one of the major feminist writers of the period who chose to distance herself from the women's suffrage movement, although in her private letters she could be forthrightly pro-suffrage. For instance, she wrote in a letter to her father in 1908: 'H. Gladstone that mediocre son of an overrated father is a feeble thing at the head of any department. The women won’t be beaten in the long run. -- In every class they have a greater average of intelligence than the men...It isn't a question of Rights. It is a question of Economic change. A Surplus population of women who must work, outside home life...means: if I pay the tax -- I must get the vote!' Some critics see an anti-authoritarian impulse in her work. Her feminism can be read as a difference feminism, or as an individualist feminism. Egerton's short stories are typically critical of organised religion, and include many discussions of atheism. She was scathing of marriage as an institution, and many of her protagonists overtly defy Victorian and Christian morality by advocating free unions, same sex parenting partnerships and single parenthood. Reputation Egerton's stylistic innovations and her often radical and feminist subject matter have ensured that her fiction continues to generate academic interest in America and Britain. Thomas Hardy acknowledged the influence of Egerton's work on his own, in particular on the construction of his "New Woman" character, Sue Bridehead, in Jude the Obscure, and Tina O'Toole has described New Woman writers in general, and Egerton in particular, as the "missing link" to the sexually transgressive work of later writers such as Kate O'Brien (novelist). Holbrook Jackson credited Egerton with the first mention of Friedrich Nietzsche in English literature (she refers to