The New Woman’s Fantasy About Adoption and Transnormative Family in George Egerton’s “The Spell of the White Elf”

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 However, Egerton did not want her writing to be limited to New Woman literature. In her personal letter to Ernst Foerster, she states that she does not like “the term ‘New Woman,’” which she finds “to be one of those loose, cheap, journalistic catch words” (“Letter” 46). She adds that she has, “contrary to opinion, no [feminist] propaganda in view – no emancipation theory to propound” (“Letter” 46).2 “The Regeneration of Two” in Egerton’s other book Discords similarly presents a woman who marries a widower not because she loves him but because she loves his three children. “Wedlock” also features a stepmother who looks after her husband’s children instead of her own child.3 See George K. Behlmer’s Friends of the Family: The English Home and Its Guardians, 1850–1940.4 We encounter child protagonists not living with their biological parents through mid-Victorian coming-of-age texts such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Villette or Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations.Additional informationFundingThe work was supported by the a Humanities·Social-Science Research Promotion of Pusan National University (2021).