George Moore
born Feb. 24, 1852, Ballyglass, County Mayo, Ire.
died Jan. 21, 1933, London
Irish novelist and man of letters. Considered an innovator in fiction in
his day, he no longer seems as important as he once did.
Moore came from a distinguished Catholic family of Irish landholders.
When he was 21, he left Ireland for Paris to become a painter. Moore’s
Reminiscences of the Impressionist Painters (1906) vividly described the
Café Nouvelle-Athènes and the circle of Impressionist painters who
frequented it. Moore was particularly friendly with Édouard Manet, who
sketched three portraits of him. Another account of the years in Paris,
in which he introduced the younger generation in England to his version
of fin de siècle decadence, was his first autobiography, Confessions of
a Young Man (1888).
Deciding that he had no talent for painting, he returned to London in
1882 to write. His first novels, A Modern Lover (1883) and A Mummer’s
Wife (1885), introduced a new note of French Naturalism into the English
scene, and he later adopted the realistic techniques of Gustave Flaubert
and Honoré de Balzac. Esther Waters (1894), his best novel, deals with
the plight of a servant girl who has a baby out of wedlock; it is a
story of hardship and humiliation illumined by the novelist’s
compassion. It was an immediate success, and he followed it with works
in a similar vein: Evelyn Innes (1898) and Sister Teresa (1901).
In 1901 Moore moved to Dublin, partly because of his loathing for the
South African War, partly because of the Irish literary renaissance
spearheaded by his friend, the poet William Butler Yeats. In Dublin he
contributed notably to the planning of the Abbey Theatre. He also
produced The Untilled Field (1903), a volume of fine short stories
reminiscent of Ivan Turgenev that focus on the drudgery of Irish rural
life, and a short, poetic novel, The Lake (1905). The real fruits of his
life in Ireland, however, came with the trilogy Hail and Farewell (Ave,
1911; Salve, 1912; Vale, 1914). Discursive, affectionate, and satirical
by turns, it reads like a sustained monologue that is both a carefully
studied piece of self-revelation and an acute (though not always
reliable) portrait gallery of his Irish acquaintance, which included
Yeats, Æ, and Lady Gregory. Above all it is a perfectly modulated
display of the comic spirit.
The increasing narrowness of the Irish mind, politics, and
clericalism had sent Moore back to England in 1911. After Hail and
Farewell he made another literary departure: aiming at epic effect he
produced The Brook Kerith (1916), an elaborate and stylish retelling of
the Gospel story that is surprisingly effective despite some dull
patches. He continued his attempts to find a prose style worthy of epic
theme in Héloïse and Abélard (1921). His other works included A
Story-Teller’s Holiday (1918), a blend of autobiography, anecdote, Irish
legend, and satire; Conversations in Ebury Street (1924), autobiography;
The Pastoral Loves of Daphnis and Chloe (1924); and Ulick and Soracha
(1926), an Irish legendary romance.
