George Moore 1852 - 1933

George Moore is a large figure in Irish letters, but a curious one. Everyone knows of him, few know about him. A biography of Moore is a huge and fascinating opportunity to explore an entire cultural world. Frazier does this, never forgetting that his main task is to narrate the abundant life of Moore himself. To do so he has seen papers in Ireland, the US, Paris and London that no other scholar has used, enabling him to reconstruct the details of Moore's romantic life. Having had affairs with Pearl Craigie and Olive Schreiner, among others, Moore settled into a long and secret liaison with another man's wife, Lady Maud Cunard whose daughter, Nancy Cunard, was very probably Moore's child, as Frazier here reveals for the first time.

A visitor to George Moore's bachelor flat in London in 1896 was astonished to see no books. What did "G.M." (as he was known) do with his time? the guest wonderedD"look at his pictures by Manet and Monet, and Morisot? Tread his Aubusson carpet?" "O, I write until... dinner," Moore said. "Writing bores me less than anything else." Along with Shaw, Yeats and others, according to Frazier in this splendid biography, "Moore was one of the writers of Irish birth who remade English literature at the end of the nineteenth century." He was one of the first to deliberately fictionalize autobiography and biography in literary form. Again and again, he retold the stories of his past (and seldom the same way)Dhis years at Moore Hall in County Mayo, Impressionist Paris, Victorian London and the Dublin of the Irish literary revival. But Frazier, a professor of English at Union College, argues that Moore's "chief creation" was "George Moore," a fictional self that was "at least in some ways unattractive, even repellent." Laced with uncommon wit, affection and attention to Moore's failings and absurdities, Frazier's biography, the first since the 1930s, is likely to reverse the long slide Moore's reputation has experienced since his death. Well researched and persuasive, the volume should also return readers to Moore's writingDhis great, Zolaesque novel Esther Waters, his Chekhovian short stories and the "fabulations of his inescapably literary being" (as Frazier call them), such as Hail and Farewell and Memoirs of My Dead Life. 31 illus. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A unique figure best known for the novel Esther Waters, George Moore was a prolific writer who, along with such figures as Henry James, revitalized Victorian fiction by infusing it with the realistic and naturalistic techniques of Balzac and Zola. Since his death, however, he has been comparatively neglected. In this new biography, the first full account of Moore's life since 1936, Frazier (English, Union Coll.) makes a convincing case for the novelist's resurrection. In addition to being a master of every literary genre, Moore was also a vibrant social, artistic, and political presence in the Paris of the Impressionists as well as the Dublin of the Irish Literary Revival. Frazier's textured prose provides a strong sense of a man who was more of his age than such contemporaries as Hardy and Conrad, who, though better known today, kept more aloof from the affairs of their own time. The author observes that this is not a literary or critical biography but a well-documented narrative intended to open paths for further exploration, several of which are outlined in the introduction. Frazier's complex portrait of an Irish landowner who lived a Bohemian life that none but the rich could afford will only make readers want to know more.DDavid Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.