Who was George Moore?

Previous posts discussed the plot (such as it is) and the autobiographical origins of Confessions of a Young Man. So I'm hoping it is obvious why the question 'Who was George Moore?' is such an important one for understanding the book. 

George Moore was born at Moore Hall in County Mayo in 1852. As well as being a landowner, his father George Henry Moore had been an MP who fought in Parliament for the rights of Irish tenants. Unusually, for a wealthy family of Anglo-Irish roots, the Moores were Catholic. 

As a child, Moore attended Oscott, a Catholic boarding school near Birmingham. He was not, however, a studious child and ended up being expelled. A career in the military was proposed, but Moore was more attracted to horse racing and the excitement of betting. He flirted with studying art, too. 

Edward Manet 'George Moore' (1879)

In 1870, Moore's father died suddenly on a trip to Ireland and the writer inherited land and money. In 1873 he moved to Paris in order to train as a painter. Although he wasn't much success as an artist, Moore managed to meet and befriend major figures from the Parisian artistic scene, including the painters, Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas and the writers Villiers de l'Isle Adam and Stéphane Mallarmé. (Manet even painted Moore's portrait on several occasions.)

Abandoning art, Moore decided to become a writer and moved back to the UK. He worked at this time as a critic, reviewing literature and painting for periodicals like The Spectator.

After an abortive attempt at writing plays, he began working on short stories and novels. Coming under the influence of the French novelist, Émile Zola, Moore established himself as a writer of realist novels. His first novel, A Modern Lover (1883) describes a young painter, Lewis Seymour working his way up through society by conducting affairs with wealthy women and securing their patronage.  But the influence of Zola is most strongly evident in his third novel, A Mummer's Wife (1884). This describes the life of a lower middle-class housewife, Kate Ede who runs away with a visiting actor. The glamour of a nomadic life with a theatrical troupe soon fades and Kate descends into alcoholism. Moore describes her final circumstances in unsparing detail that recalls similar scenes of alcoholism and destitution in Zola's L'Assommoir.

Moore's best known novel is probably Esther Waters (1894); this is another work of realism that describes the life of a young English servant who is plunged into disgrace and poverty by conceiving a child out of wedlock. But as the nineteenth century drew to a close, Moore returned to Ireland and became actively involved with the Irish Literary Revival. He worked with W.B. Yeats and others in an attempt to create an Irish national cultural identity through theatre, art and other literary forms. Moore was, in many respects, an unusual and unorthodox member of this movement. His involvement coincided with a period of intense disillusion with Catholicism, so that he espoused an Anglophile Protestantism whilst campaigning for Irish cultural causes.

During the early twentieth century, Moore returned to the autobiographical forms with which he had experimented ten or twenty years previously in Confessions of a Young Man.  Between 1911 and 1914 he published, Hale and Farewell an account of his interactions within Irish literary circles. But his approach was informal and satirical and this work attracted considerable attention for its scurrilous and gossipy portraits of contemporary Irish writers.

Moore split his final years between Dublin and London, writing historical religious novels and compiling further autobiographical works, such as Conversations in Ebury Street (1924) and A Communication with my Friends, before his death in 1933.  

Having provided some brief details here about the life of George Moore, it is important to recognise that whilst they relate to the  'George Moore' that readers encounter across his autobiographical writings, those two figures are not necessarily synonymous. Indeed, future posts will explore some of the ways in which Moore exposed the kinds of fictions we create when we try to tell the story of a life (or lives). In this context, I'm always struck by how different he looks when different artists try to capture his likeness (as you can see here).

Walter Sickert, 'George Moore' (c.1890) 
Tate Gallery

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