I've been putting off writing this post for a bit now. When I started this blog, I explained that I hoped to use the exercise of writing about George Moore and Confessions of a Young Man to jumpstart a project that had been delayed by COVID. The aim was to write up some of the ideas that I'm going to use for a general introduction to a critical edition of Confessions . And so far that has worked fine (for me) - Moore is a fascinating and interesting person and Confessions is a complex and provocative text: all kinds of influences run through it. But one of the problems holding me back has been the crafting of a logical hook upon which to hang all the different ideas and topics that I'd like to fit into the introduction. The solution that I have in mind is to use the following passage from chapter four of Confessions: Many are the reasons for love, but I confess I only love woman or book, when it is as a voice of conscience, never heard before, heard suddenly, a voice I am ...

The critical edition of Confessions of a Young Man that I'm preparing is based on the text of the second book version that George Moore published in 1889 (only a year after he published it as a book). One of the major changes he made for that version of the book was the insertion of additional chapter, just before the end of the book. That chapter - chapter 12 of the 1889 version of Confessions  - is another example of how Moore experiments with narrative form in his book. It is set up for the most part, like the script of a play and it consists largely of a dialogue staged between the narrator and his own conscience. The chapter has no subtitle in the English version of the text, but Moore first published this chapter within a French translation that appeared in 1888. In that version the chapter was subtitled 'Examen de Minuit' (Midnight Examination or Thoughts at Midnight).  Some parts of Confessions deliberately complicate our understanding by introducing new or diverse...