George Moore, 1852-1933

By Adrian Frazier

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300082452
• ISBN13: 9780300082456
• Release Date: May 2000
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 448 Pages
• Weight: 2.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 2.0" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

Deeply satisfying and moving; ranks near Ellmann and Edel.

Unlike Yeats, Joyce, or James, George Moore did not have a strong and confident sense of his own identity, and has in consequence remained a rather dim and shadowy figure on the literary landscape of his time. Frazier has succeeded uncannily in getting inside Moore's skin, almost to the point of understanding him better than he understood himself. For the first time the many divergent facets of Moore's career come together in a coherent and gripping narrative. We see that though his enthusiasms, literary loyalties, and amorous propensities were as changeable as the clouds above Lake Carra, Moore was tenacious in a Quixotic quest for truth and freedom. His witty, indiscreet conversation, still so fresh in the pages of Hail and Farewell, Avowals, and Conversations in Ebury Street, was calculated to puncture many a pompous ego. A master of ridicule, he was repaid in kind. But a lifetime of struggle against British philistinism, Irish parochialism, and French cliquism cannot be written off as mere clowning. Moore often let himself down, yet his achievement as a whole deserves the epithet "heroic." Had Irish Catholics and Nationalists, in particular, listened to his enlightened critique, they might have spared themselves a century of repression, mystification, and violence. Frazier illuminates Moore's sexuality (especially his relationships with Pearl Craigie and Lady Cunard) with Starr-like thoroughness. This serves to enhance our appreciation of his fiction: masterpieces such as Muslin, The Lake (1921 version), and In Single Strictness take on a new glow as we discover the erotic humus from which they spring, while the lesser or flawed works take on new interest as fragments of a great confession. Frazier has buried the George Moore of stale gossip and caricature and replaced it with a portrait as distinguished as Manet's on the front cover -- a portrait securely grounded in wide-ranging historical research.