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."