Queer Places:
Moore Hall in Carra, County Mayo
121 Ebury St, Belgravia, London SW1W, UK
Castle Island in Lough Carra in
view of the ruins of Moore Hall
George
Augustus Moore (24 February 1852 – 21 January 1933) was
an Irish novelist, short-story writer, poet, art critic, memoirist and
dramatist. Sally Ledger has argued that male writers tended to present female
same-sex relationships in a different way from women novelists, explicity
pathologising their New Women characters as unmarried and lesbian, as in the
case of Olive Chancellor in Henry James' The
Bostonians (1886) and Cecilia Cullen in George Moore's A Drama in Muslin
(1886).
Moore came from a Roman Catholic landed family who lived at Moore
Hall in Carra, County Mayo.[1] He
originally wanted to be a painter, and studied art in Paris during the 1870s.
There, he befriended many of the leading French artists and writers of the
day. As a naturalistic writer, he was amongst the first English-language
authors to absorb the lessons of the French realists, and was particularly
influenced by the works of Émile Zola.[2] His
writings influenced James Joyce, according to the literary critic and
biographer Richard Ellmann,[3] and,
although Moore's work is sometimes seen as outside the mainstream of both
Irish and British literature, he is as often regarded as the first great
modern Irish novelist.
George Moore's family had lived in Moore Hall, near Lough Carra, County
Mayo, for almost a century.[4] The
house was built by his paternal great-grandfather — also called George Moore —
who had made his fortune as a wine merchant in Alicante.[5] The
novelist's grandfather was a friend of Maria
Edgeworth, and author of An Historical Memoir of the French Revolution.[6] His
great-uncle, John Moore, was president of the Province of Connacht in the
short-lived Irish Republic of 1798[7] during
the Irish Rebellion of 1798. George Moore's father, George Henry Moore, sold
his stable and hunting interests during the Great Irish Famine, and from 1847
to 1857 served as an Independent Member of Parliament (MP) for Mayo in
the British House of Commons.[8] George
Henry was renowned as a fair landlord, fought to uphold the rights of tenants,[9] and
was a founder of the Catholic Defence Association. His estate consisted of
5000 ha (50 km²) in Mayo, with a further 40 ha in County Roscommon.
Moore was born in Moore Hall in 1852. As a child, he enjoyed the novels
of Walter Scott, which his father read to him.[10] He
spent a good deal of time outdoors with his brother, Maurice George Moore, and
also became friendly with the young Willie and Oscar
Wilde, who spent their summer holidays at nearby Moytura. Oscar was to
later quip of Moore: "He conducts his education in public".[11]
His father had again turned his attention to horse breeding and in 1861
brought his champion horse, Croagh Patrick, to England for a successful racing
season, together with his wife and nine-year-old son. For a while George was
left at Cliff's stables until his father decided to send him to his alma mater
facilitated by his winnings. Moore's formal education started at St. Mary's
College, Oscott, a Catholic boarding school near Birmingham, where he was the
youngest of 150 boys. He spent all of 1864 at home, having contracted a lung
infection brought about by a breakdown in his health. His academic performance
was poor while he was hungry and unhappy. In January 1865, he returned to St.
Mary's College with his brother Maurice, where he refused to study as
instructed and spent time reading novels and poems.[12] That
December the principal, Spencer Northcote, wrote a report that: "he hardly
knew what to say about George." By the summer of 1867 he was expelled, for (in
his own words) 'idleness and general worthlessness', and returned to Mayo. His
father once remarked, about George and his brother Maurice: "I fear those two
redheaded boys are stupid", an observation which proved untrue for all four
sons.[13]
In 1868, Moore's father was again elected MP for Mayo and the family moved
to London the following year. Here, Moore senior tried, unsuccessfully, to
have his son follow a career in the military though, prior to this, he
attended the School of Art in the South Kensington Museum where his
achievements were no better. He was freed from any burden of education when
his father died in 1870.[13] Moore,
though still a minor, inherited the family estate that was valued at £3,596.
He handed it over to his brother Maurice to manage and in 1873, on attaining
his majority, moved to Paris to study art. It took him several attempts to
find an artist who would accept him as a pupil. Monsieur Jullian, who had
previously been a shepherd and circus masked man, took him on for 40 francs a
month.[14] At
Académie Jullian he met Lewis Weldon Hawkins who became Moore's flatmate and
whose trait, as a failed artist, show up in Moore's own characters.[13] He
met many of the key artists and writers of the time,
including Pissarro, Degas, Renoir, Monet, Daudet, Mallarmé, Turgenev and,
above all, Zola, who was to prove an influential figure in Moore's subsequent
development as a writer. While still in Paris his first book, a collection of
lyric poems called The Flowers of Passion, was self-published in 1877. The
poems were derivative, and were maliciously reviewed by the critics who were
offended by some of the depravities in store for moralistic readers. The book
was withdrawn by Moore.[15][16] He
was forced to return to Ireland in 1880 to raise £3,000 to pay debts incurred
on the family estate due to his tenants refusing to pay their rent and the
drop in agricultural prices.[16] During
his time back in Mayo, he gained a reputation as a fair landlord, continuing
the family tradition of not evicting tenants and refusing to carry firearms
when travelling round the estate. While in Ireland, he decided to abandon art
and move to London to become a professional writer. There he published his
second poetry collection, Pagan Poems, in 1881. These early poems reflect his
interest in French symbolism and are now almost entirely neglected. In 1886
Moore published Confessions of a Young Man, a lively memoir about his 20s
spent in Paris and London among bohemian artists.[17] It
contains a substantial amount of literary criticism for which it has received
a fair amount of praise,[17][18] for
instance The Modern Library chose it in 1917 to be included in the series as
"one of the most significant documents of the passionate revolt of English
literature against the Victorian tradition."[18]
During the 1880s, Moore began work on a series of novels in
a realist style. His first novel, A Modern Lover (1883) was a three-volume
work, as preferred by the circulating libraries, and deals with the art scene
of the 1870s and 1880s in which many characters are identifiably real.[19] The
circulating libraries in England banned the book because of its explicit
portrayal of the amorous pursuits of its hero. At this time the British
circulating libraries, such as Mudie's Select Library, controlled the market
for fiction and the public, who paid fees to borrow their books, expected them
to guarantee the morality of the novels available.[20] His
next book, a novel in the realist style, A Mummers Wife (1885) was also
regarded as unsuitable by Mudie's and W H Smith refused to stock it on their
news-stalls. Despite this, during its first year of publication the book was
in its fourteenth edition mainly due to the publicity stirred up by its
opponents.[21] The
French newspaper Le Voltaire published it in serial form as La Femme du
cabotin in July–October 1886.[22] His
next novel A Drama in Muslin was banned by Mudie's and Smith's. In response
Moore declared war on the circulating libraries by publishing two
provocative pamphlets; Literature at Nurse and Circulating Morals. In these,
he complained that the libraries profit from salacious popular fiction while
refusing to stock serious literary fiction. Moore's publisher Henry
Vizetelly began to issue unabridged mass-market translations of French realist
novels that endangered the moral and commercial influence of the circulating
libraries around this time. In 1888, the circulating libraries fought back by
encouraging the House of Commons to implement laws to stop "the rapid spread
of demoralising literature in this country". However, Vizetelly was brought to
court by the National Vigilance Association (NVA) for "obscene libel". The
charge arose due to the publication of the English translation of Zola's La
Terre. A second case was brought the following year to force implementation of
the original judgement and to remove all of Zola's works. This led to the
70-year-old publisher becoming involved in the literary cause.[23] Throughout
Moore stayed loyal to Zola's publisher, and on 22 September 1888, about a
month before the trial, wrote a letter that appeared in the St. James Gazette.
In it Moore suggested that it was improper for Vizetelly's fate to be
determined by a jury of twelve tradesmen, explaining that it would be
preferable to be judged by three novelists. Moore pointed out that the NVA
could make the same claims against such books as Madame
Bovary and Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin, as their morals are equivalent to
Zola's, though their literary merits might differ.[24]
Because of his willingness to tackle such issues as prostitution, extramarital
sex and lesbianism, Moore's novels were initially met with disapproval.
However, as the public's taste for realist fiction grew, this subsided. Moore
began to find success as an art critic with the publication of books such
as Impressions and Opinions (1891) and Modern Painting (1893)—which was the
first significant attempt to introduce the Impressionists to an English
audience. By this time Moore was first able to live from the proceeds of his
literary work. Other realist novels by Moore from this period include A Drama
in Muslin (1886), a satiric story of the marriage trade in Anglo-Irish society
that hints at same-sex relationships among the unmarried daughters of the
gentry, and Esther Waters (1894), the story of an unmarried housemaid who
becomes pregnant and is abandoned by her footman lover. Both of these books
have remained almost constantly in print since their first publication. His
1887 novel A Mere Accident is an attempt to merge his symbolist and realist
influences. He also published a collection of short stories: Celibates (1895).
In 1901, Moore returned to Ireland to live in Dublin at the suggestion of
his cousin and friend, Edward Martyn. Martyn had been involved in Ireland's
cultural and dramatic movements for some years, and was working with Lady
Gregory and William Butler Yeats to establish the Irish Literary Theatre.
Moore soon became deeply involved in this project and in the broader Irish
Literary Revival. He had already written a play, The Strike at
Arlingford (1893), which was produced by the Independent Theatre. The play was
the result of a challenge between Moore and George Robert Sims over Moore's
criticism of all contemporary playwrights in Impressions and Opinions. Moore
won the one hundred pound bet made by Sims for a stall to witness an
"unconventional" play by Moore, though Moore insisted the word
"unconventional" be excised.[25]
The Irish Literary Theatre staged his satirical comedy The Bending of the
Bough (1900), adapted from Martyn's The Tale of a Town, originally rejected by
the theatre but unselfishly given to Moore for revision, and Martyn's Maeve.
Staged by the company who would later become the Abbey Theatre, The Bending of
the Bough was a historically important play and introduced realism into Irish
literature. Lady Gregory wrote that it: "hits impartially all round".[26] The
play was satire on Irish political life, and as it was unexpectedly
nationalist, was considered the first to deal with a vital question that had
appeared in Irish life.[26] Diarmuid
and Grania, a poetic play in prose co-written with Yeats in 1901, was also
staged by the theatre,[27] with
incidental music by Elgar.[28] After
this production Moore took up pamphleteering on behalf of the Abbey, and
parted company with the dramatic movement.[26]
Moore published two books of prose fiction set in Ireland around this time; a
second book of short stories, The Untilled Field (1903) and a novel, The
Lake (1905). The Untilled Field deal with themes of clerical interference in
the daily lives of the Irish peasantry, and of the issue of emigration. The
stories were originally written for translation into Irish, to serve as models
for other writers working in the language. Three of the translations were
published in the New Ireland Review, but publication was then paused due to a
perceived anti-clerical sentiment. In 1902 the entire collection was
translated by Tadhg Ó Donnchadha and Pádraig Ó Súilleabháin, and published in
a parallel-text edition by the Gaelic League as An-tÚr-Ghort. Moore later
revised the texts for the English edition. These stories were influenced
by Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches, a book recommended to Moore by W. K.
Magee, a sub-librarian of the National Library of Ireland, and had earlier
suggested that Moore "was best suited to become Ireland's Turgenev".[29] The
tales are recognised by some as representing the birth of the Irish short
story as a literary genre.[3]
In 1903, following a disagreement with his brother Maurice over the religious
upbringing of his nephews, Moore declared himself to be Protestant. His
conversion was announced in a letter to the Irish Times newspaper.[30] Moore
remained in Dublin until 1911. In 1914, he published a gossipy, three-volume
memoir of his time there under the collective title Hail and Farewell, which
entertained its readers but infuriated former friends. Moore himself said of
these memoirs, "Dublin is now divided into two sets; one half is afraid it
will be in the book, and the other is afraid that it won't".[31]
In his later years he was increasingly friendless, having quarrelled bitterly
with Yeats and Osborn Bergin, among others: Oliver St. John Gogarty said: "It
was impossible to be a friend of his, because he was incapable of gratitude".[32]
Moore returned to London in 1911, where, with the exception of frequent
trips to France, he was to spend much of the rest of his life. In 1913, he
travelled to Jerusalem to research for his next novel, The Brook
Kerith (1916). The book saw Moore once again embroiled in controversy, as it
was based on the supposition that a non-divine Christ did not die on the cross
but instead was nursed back to health.[3] Other
books from this period include a further collection of short-stories called A
Storyteller's Holiday (1918), a collection of essays called Conversations in
Ebury Street (1924) and a play, The Making of an Immortal (1927). Moore also
spent considerable time revising and preparing his earlier writings for new
editions.[3]
Partly due to Maurice's pro-treaty activity, Moore Hall was burnt by
anti-treaty forces in 1923, during the final months of the Irish Civil War.[33] Moore
eventually received compensation of £7,000 from the government of the Irish
Free State. By this time George and Maurice had become estranged, mainly
because of an unflattering portrait of the latter which appeared in Hail and
Farewell. Tension also arose as a result of religious differences: Maurice
frequently made donations to the Roman Catholic Church from estate funds.[34] Moore
later sold a large part of the estate to the Irish Land Commission for
£25,000. Moore was friendly with many members of the expatriate artistic
communities in London and Paris, and had a long-lasting relationship
with Maud, Lady Cunard. Moore took a special interest in the education of
Maud's daughter, the well-known publisher and art patron, Nancy
Cunard.[35] It
has been suggested that Moore, rather than Maud's husband, Sir Bache Cunard,
was Nancy's father,[36] but
this is not generally credited by historians, and it is not certain that
Moore's relationship with Nancy's mother was ever other than platonic.[37] Moore
was believed by some to be impotent and was described as "one who told but
didn't kiss".[38] Moore's
last novel, Aphrodite in Aulis, was published in 1930.[3]
He died at his home at Ebury Street in the London district of Belgravia in
early 1933, leaving a fortune of £70,000. He was cremated in London at a
service attended by Ramsay MacDonald among others. An urn containing his ashes
was interred on Castle Island in Lough Carra in view of the ruins of Moore
Hall.[3]
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