ABSTRACT
This chapter explores notion of late-Victorian queer ecology by exploring the displacement within the George Egerton's gender politics of the anthropocentric turn often adopted in scholarly analyses of her representation of nature as a reflection of gender. It analyses the place of earth-based spirituality in Victorian formulations of environmental sensitivity and responsibility. Such a reading suggests that Egerton recognised that more common understandings of environmentalism have historically hinged heavily on a model of stewardship, resulting in an overemphasis on human agency in the management of a natural ideal that, has never existed. For an alternative formulation, the Egerton turns in her stories to a pagan paradigm foregrounding an ecological diversity characterised by trans-species linkages and attractions. A number of Victorians turned to paganism in order to tangle the categorical lines aimed at separating humans, other animals and other elements of nature—so many, that it gave rise to the Neo-pagan Movement.
