Patricia Murphy, Missouri Southern State University
Vol. 44, No. 1 (Spring 2025)

ABSTRACT: The workings of time play a vital and fascinating role in two short stories penned by the controversial writer George Egerton. Since the nineteenth century had seen numerous scientific and cultural developments that unsettled longstanding beliefs, Victorians became obsessed with time and widely perceived linear time as privileging men and subordinating women. The Egerton tales address the associations of linear time in complex ways to protest societal assumptions and practices that oppressed women. “Virgin Soil” (1894) reveals the masculinist inflections of linear time and their damaging effects upon women, even as the female protagonist endeavors to diminish their influence in hopes of attaining a measure of freedom. “An Empty Frame” (1893), by contrast, examines the hold of memory, another manifestation of time that intrigued Victorians. Contemporary thought held that memory could not be destroyed, and that the past dismally defined this female protagonist’s existence. The two stories thus provide an important lens for understanding Victorian culture at the fin de siècle.