George Moore, 1852-1933

Always at the centre of any artistic and cultural excitement, the Irish writer George Moore enjoyed a sixty-year literary career of prolific writing, challenging friendships in Paris, London and Dublin, and relationships - though not marriage - with some of the most interesting women of his time. This book - the first full 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 and other archives to reveal new information about Moore's early life, his ostensibly promiscuous bachelor days, 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, 'Esther Waters' being the best-known. His experiments in style ranged from the naturalistic 'A Mummer's Wife' to the stream of consciousness prose of 'The Lake' and the seamless, fluent narratives of his late manner - the comic 'Hail and Farewell', and the epic 'The Book Kerith'. Frazier records the relationships between Moore and his well-known friends - Yeats, Joyce, Archer, Shaw, Frank Harris, Sickert, Whistler and 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 biographer who would candidly tell the story of his life, loves and art. Adrian Frazier has now written that story. Adrian Frazier is professor of English at Union College, Schenectady, New York. Among his publications are 'Behind the Scenes: Yeats, Horniman and the Struggle for the Abbey Theatre' (1990).