George Moore, 1852-1933

Always at the center of cultural change and excitement, George Moore enjoyed a sixty-year literary career during which he wrote prolifically, befriended artists and authors from Paris to London to Dublin, and rejected marriage but never the company of women. This book—the first documentary biography of Moore since 1936—tells the remarkable story of a high-spirited man and his pathbreaking innovations as a writer. Adrian Frazier has mined letters, memoirs, society journals, writings not previously attributed to Moore, and other archives to reveal new information about Moore’s early life, his ostensibly promiscuous bachelor life, and his complex career as an author.

The book provides an engaging account of Moore’s pursuit of his passions, from his early, failed attempt to become an artist in Paris in the 1870s through his long career as an author. Moore wrote plays, poetry, criticism, short stories, and sixteen novels, among them his best-known Esther Waters. His experiments in style ranged from the naturalistic A Mummer’s Wife to the stream-of-consciousness prose of The Lake to the seamless, fluent narratives of his late manner—the comic Hail and Farewell and the epic The Brook Kerith. Frazier records the relationships between Moore and his well-known friends—Yeats, Joyce, Archer, Shaw, Frank Harris, Sickert, Whistler, and many others—and with the many women in his life, including his greatest love, Lady Cunard. At the end of his life, Moore sought without success a writer who would candidly tell the story of his life, loves, and art. At last Adrian Frazier has written that story.