George Moore

George Moore (Moore Hall, County Mayo, 1852 – London, 1933) was an Irish novelist who also wrote poetry, art criticism, memoirs and drama. He wrote in English at the end of the Victorian era, and he is considered one of the first English-language authors to absorb the lessons of French realism, especially those of Zola. Many critics regard him as the first great modern Irish novelist, although his work sometimes sits outside both the Irish and the British literary mainstreams.

He came from a Catholic landed family that had made its fortune in wine and politics. His father sat in Westminster and defended tenants' rights. Moore wanted to be a painter and, after an unremarkable spell at the art school in South Kensington, moved to Paris in 1873. There he met Pissarro, Degas, Monet, Daudet and Zola. His first book of poems, The Flowers of Passion (1877), was poorly received, and he later withdrew it. After returning to Ireland to settle debts on the family estate, he settled in London as a professional writer.

His realist novels, such as A Modern Lover (1883) and A Mummer's Wife (1885), clashed with the circulating libraries, which refused to stock them because of their frankness about love and sexuality. Moore answered with provocative pamphlets and supported his publisher Henry Vizetelly when Vizetelly was prosecuted for publishing Zola. Over time public taste shifted, and his name became associated with art criticism and memoir as well, as in Confessions of a Young Man. His legacy lies in opening a path for naturalist fiction in English, an influence that, according to the critic Richard Ellmann, reached James Joyce.