Moorings

A Bulletin of All Things George Moore

No 1 : Summer 2007

[The following is adapted from Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn, 'General Introduction' to The Collected Short Stories of George Moore: Gender and Genre, Pickering and Chatto, 2007.]

George Augustus Moore was born on 24 February 1852 to George Henry Moore (1810-70) and Mary Blake Moore (1830-1895) at Moore Hall in County Mayo, Ireland. Following an unhappy education at the Roman Catholic school St Mary’s College, Oscott (just outside Birmingham, England) between the ages of 14 and 16, brought to an end by Moore’s all-too-willing early departure, and more congenial times spent at home on the family’s estates and in exploring Lough Carra, Moore decided in 1868 upon a career as an artist against the wishes of his father who insisted he pursue a career in the military. At his father’s death in 1870 Moore inherited both the family’s Irish lands and the right to decide his own future. In his twenty-first year, 1873, he handed his day-to-day responsibilities as a landlord to his mother’s brother and moved to Paris. Living a Bohemian life in Parisian studios, and more importantly cafés such as the Nouvelle Athènes, Moore made the connections with artists and writers which would influence his entire writing life. Initially financially secure thanks to the income from his inheritance, Moore met a largely older generation of literary and artistic figures such as Alphonse Daudet (1840-97), Edgar Degas (1834-1917), Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98), Edouard Manet (1832-83), Claude Monet (1840-1926), Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), Ivan Turgenev (1818-83), and Emile Zola (1840-1902). Moore soon came to realize that he lacked sufficient talent for painting and turned to literature instead. Amongst his first outputs as a writer were two volumes of verse influenced by Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) and Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909), Flowers of Passion (1877) and Pagan Poems (1881), and with them Moore began his “lifelong habit of pursuing perfection” in his rewriting of poems published in the first collection in the second.

1879 is the year in which Moore truly became a writer, and it was through necessity. Increasing friction between the landowners and their tenants in Ireland reduced Moore’s income from his inherited estates, hastening his return to London with the intention to make a profession out of journalism and fiction writing. Influenced by his exposure to French literary culture, Moore’s determination to bring Zola’s Naturalism to the English novel resulted in A Modern Lover (1883), banned for its “explicit” portrayal of the protagonist’s sexual encounters, and A Mummer’s Wife in 1885. The reception Moore’s first novels received, particularly from the circulating libraries and their proprietors W. H. Smith and Charles Edward Mudie, prompted his dissatisfaction with late-Victorian conditions of literary production, the English novel generally and its reading public. His pamphlet Literature at Nurse; or, Circulating Morals (1885) attacked the illiberal nature of the monopoly over taste held by men such as Mudie and helped to raise the young Moore’s public profile. The subsequent imprisonment of Henry Vizetelly, the publisher of Moore’s first four novels and also of the English translations of Zola in which Moore played a part, demonstrated the dangers of literary experimentation and innovation.

Moore’s production levels throughout his career were always impressive; there were novels: A Drama in Muslin (1886), A Mere Accident (1887), Spring Days (1888), Mike Fletcher (1889), Vain Fortune (1891) Esther Waters (1894), Evelyn Innes (1898), Sister Teresa (1901), The Lake (1905), The Brook Kerith (1916), Aphrodite in Aulis (1930); essays and reviews: Parnell and His Island (1887), Impressions and Opinions (1891), Modern Painting (1893); “autobiographies”: Confessions of a Young Man (1888), Memoirs of My Dead Life (1906), the Hail and Farewell trilogy [Ave (1911), Salve (1912), Vale (1914)], Avowals (1919), Conversations in Ebury Street (1924), and the posthumously published A Communication to my Friends (1933); and collaborative plays written with Bernard Lopez, Pearl Craigie (“John Oliver Hobbes”), Edward Martyn and W. B. Yeats. His involvement with the various movements of the period 1880-1910 — English Naturalism, Wagnerism, Realism, or the Irish Literary Revival — demonstrated that Moore could recreate himself to suit the mode of the moment. During his time in Dublin (1901-11), for example, he reinvented himself as a key figure in the movement to establish the Irish Literary Theatre (working with Yeats and Lady Gregory), including collaborating with Yeats on Diarmuid and Grania in 1901. In 1903, in a letter to the Irish Times, Moore renounced the Catholicism which had been a burden to him since his childhood, in the year which saw the publication of his important Irish short story collection The Untilled Field.

From the early years of the twentieth century, and particularly following his move back from Ireland to London in 1911, Moore’s writing life, always devoted to the perfection of the narrative, was dominated by his revision of his earlier works and by his increasing concern with writing memoirs and (semi-fictionalized) autobiographies. Dedicated to the dissection of his own life, and notorious for the razor-sharp scrutiny of those whom he encountered, Moore spared no one in pursuit of his art, be it his fellow writers or the various women with whom he had relationships. Several of his early novels were released in “new” versions as Moore returned to his youthful texts in order to correct his perception of their inadequacies; thus A Modern Lover (1883) became Lewis Seymour and Some Women (1917), and A Drama in Muslin (1886) was made over as Muslin (1915). He was in the process of redrafting his memories of his first ventures into art and literature for A Communication to my Friends when he died in London in 1933.