Synopsis
Once again available, Dalkey Archive's edition of the four books of lost British modernist Olive Moore (born around 1905, believed to have died around 1970) includes three novels, Celestial Seraglio, a wicked account of coming of age in a Belgian convent school; Spleen, about a woman who goes into self-imposed exile in Italy after giving birth to a deformed child; and Fugue, the story of a clever newspaper woman, pregnant and unmarried, suffocating amidst the English expatriate intelligentsia. The fourth book, The Apple Is Bitten Again (1934) is a dazzling and disturbing collection of observations and aphorisms on modern civilization and art.
Reviews
English novelist Moore is utterly absent from conventional literary history: her work has never been anthologized, her name appears in virtually no literary "companions," and the years of her birth (c. 1905) and death (c. 1970) are not known for sure. Yet this volume--comprised of three short novels, a collection of notebook entries, and a selection of essays--showcases a writer of resounding eloquence and inspiring audacity. The first novel, the substantially autobiographical Celestial Seraglio , tumbles through the world of a French convent for both Catholic and English Protestant girls. Relationships develop, only to be smashed as adolescent enthusiasms turn from the lives of the saints to the confessional, to cynicism, and again to piety. Spleen recounts the ponderings of Ruth, a woman who has exiled herself to an Italian Mediterranean island following the birth of her deformed son. Her vision of (specifically European) social corruption and artistic vigor is heightened on the island, and when her husband dies, she returns alone to England strangely rejuvenated, ironically triumphant. In Fugue we once again find an Englishwoman abroad, this time in Alsace: Lavinia Reade is pregnant, unmarried, and losing her man. Love, friendship and independence are juggled before the macabre conclusion falls like a shroud. In her fiction, Moore's formal ambitions have a 1920s Modernist character; one is reminded of Virginia Woolf's dense, circular narratives, and in fact both writers lived in London's Bloomsbury. Moore's notebooks reveal this opinionated woman's personal, almost petulant side, which can scintillate as well as aggravate. Her ringing critical insights are too abbreviated, and casual thoughts are rendered too profoundly. But for all the salt one swallows, Moore's incisiveness gleams. She felt a devout responsibility to tell more than stories, yet she is far too sophisticated to sound pedagogic. Her authority springs from a prose that is, after all, delicious, delicate and bracing.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Collected here are four novels and a book of reflections by English journalist Constance Vaughan, who published these works between 1929 and 1934 under the pseudonym Olive Moore before disappearing without a trace. Celestial Seraglio deals with the restricted lives of schoolgirls in a Belgian convent; Spleen is a tale of a young woman who flees to Italy with her physically and mentally defective son; and Fugue uses the character of an unconventional young woman to paint a dark critique of modern relationships and the stultifying effects of life in industrialized England. The original, if cynical, observations in The Apple Is Bitten Again reinforce the bitter and brutal themes of Moore's fiction and extend her vision of the creative artist as the sole source of vitality in an otherwise barren society. The collection's scholarly value is limited by the unavailability of Moore's manuscripts, which has prevented substantial textual commentary, and by the disappointing lack of critical analysis and bibliography. Still, it makes Moore's works, which have been out of print, available to scholars and should be of particular interest to feminist literary critics, British modernists, and readers of serious fiction.
- Ellen Finnie Duranceau, MIT Lib.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
