George Moore

Moore was born at Moore Hall, Ballyglass, Co. Mayo, on 24 February 1852. The house had been built by the novelist’s great-grandfather, a wine merchant who married into a Spanish Catholic family - his son John Moore was briefly proclaimed President of the republic of Connaught during the 1798 French invasion and died in prison. Moore himself was educated at a Roman Catholic school near Birmingham, but he loathed it and later rejected Catholicism. Moore's father was elected to parliament in 1868 and took the family to London.

An army career was planned for Moore, but his father died in 1870, and at twenty-one he left for Paris to fulfil an ambition to become an artist. In the next few years he mixed with painters such as Renoir, Degas, Monet and, returning briefly to London, Whistler and Millais. Recognising his own inadequacy as a painter, he turned to writing, publishing two early volumes of poetry, Flowers of Passion (1878) and Pagan Poems (1881). In 1880 the land war and the withholding of rents forced Moore to return to Ireland. He put affairs at Moore Hall in order as best he could, then moved to London, finding journalistic work as he completed his first novel.

In France Moore had been converted to the new naturalist movement in literature and had met Emile Zola in Paris. The French author's influence is certainly apparent in A Modern Lover (1883), which recounts the experiences of a rising young artist in London, and of the women he betrays in pursuit of success. Moore joined a touring company to acquire the right naturalistic atmosphere for A Mummer's Life (1885), in which a strolling player rescues a draper's wife from her dull existence. Similarly, he took part in the Dublin season to acquire material for A Drama in Muslin (1886), a sharply satirical portrait of Anglo-Irish society. As in other novels, Moore writes understandingly of women (there is no hero) and paints a notable portrait of a 'new woman', Alice Barton.

Moore gradually moved away from Zola's naturalism, seeking to describe not merely observed events but the psychological milieu in which they occurred. His later influences were the aesthete Walter Pater, Ivan Turgenev and the French writer Edouard Dujardin, who had made use of the interior monologue in Les Lauriers Sont Coupes.

However, while there was a good reception for Confessions of a Young Man (1888) and the essays of Impressions and Opinions (1891) and Modern Painting (1893), there were several failures before his first major work, Esther Waters (1894). Esther is a servant girl, and in the naturalist tradition she might have succumbed to her oppressive environment. Instead, she rebels against it. Forced into service she becomes pregnant by another servant who abandons her; she leaves her child with a farmer, then rescues it. Her subsequent life is hard, but she maintains her own integrity and concludes, "There's a good time coming; that's what I always says".

The short stories of Celibates (1895) were followed by two more novels, Evelyn Innes (1898) and Sister Teresa (1901), but Moore was unhappy with his work. In 1901 he settled in Dublin, joining his friends W.B. Yeats and Edward Martyn as a director of the Irish Literary Theatre, but his propensity for petty quarrels was well exercised in the following decade.

He published a new collection of Irish stories, The Untilled Field (1903), and a short novel, The Lake (1905), before returning to London in 1911. His acerbic account of these Irish years, Hail and Farewell, appeared in three parts, Ave, Salve and Vale (1911-14), settling old scores with cruel descriptions of Yeats and others. Moore, ever prolific, wrote with increasing elegance. Of his later novels, The Brook Kerith (1916) and Heloise and Abelard (1921) are the most notable, while Conversations in Ebury Street (1924) contains challenging literary judgements.

He was out of fashion when he died in London on 21 January 1933, and not until recent years has his whole body of work begun to receive renewed attention.

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