George Moore’s Héloïse: Melancholy Independence Connected to the Natural World

LIKE MUCH OF HIS LATE WORK George Moore’s Héloïse and Abélard (1921) has failed to find lasting popularity with readers or with critics. It has received little attention and lacks the appeal of his realist fictions A Drama in Muslin (1886), Esther Waters (1894), and The Untilled Field (1903), the only three of Moore’s texts to remain in print today. This unpopularity may stem (at least in part) from the density of Moore’s difficult and unwieldy “melodic line.” As Harold Orel notes, critics fight a losing battle in trying to convince readers to consume Moore’s prose in bulk for the full experience of its virtues.¹ Héloïse and Abélard is indeed a dense text: paragraphs stretch over pages, dialogue is not distinguished from the body of the narrative, and inset stories last for several chapters.² Perhaps because of this prosodic complexity criticism has focused on tracing intertextual references or exploring historical fidelity and anachronisms.³ There have been relatively few close readings of the text, a paucity that is unfortunate because Héloïse and Abélard rewards careful attention both for its own merits and for its development of Moore’s authorial preoccupation with women’s intellectual and sexual autonomy. His vision of medieval France is one which closely resembles his literary evocations of Victorian social and sexual mores. This article considers the novel in relation to his earlier narratives of female quest, A Drama in Muslin and Esther Waters; all three are shaped by Moore’s fascination with the lives of women and his refusal to depict extramarital sexual experience and pregnancy as moral failures that deserve punishment, in this rather different from the male contemporaries with whom he was often compared, Hardy and James.

Much of Moore’s writing was shaped, implicitly and explicitly, by his absorption in romance and in myth, even as late as Ulick and Soracha, published in 1926. His particular interest in the love story of Peter Abélard and Héloïse arose from his work A Story-Teller’s Holiday (1918), which contains his retellings of stories from the Bible, from Irish hagiography and myth, and from French and Russian novels. As soon as he had finished A Story-Teller’s Holiday, he began his researches for Héloïse and Abélard: he read medieval philosophy and studies of the history, architecture, and geography of twelfth-century France, and in July 1919 travelled to France to retrace the lovers’ journey through Touraine and Brittany. This experience brought his vision of the couple vividly before him. He wrote to a friend: “I lie in bed in the morning and lose myself in dreams, seeing Abélard and Héloïse and hearing them talking and suddenly I fall to wondering if I shall get all this dreaming down on paper.”⁴ Once his research had been completed and composition had begun, Moore dictated 1,500 to 2,000 words a day, and locked away the pages each night to prevent him from revising the work, since he planned “to proceed with scarcely more knowledge of the furrow behind me than the ox.”⁵ When he had completed a full draft, he began revision, attempting to achieve what he called the “right quality on every sentence” and to make sure that his prose was “eighteenth-century English as far as possible—pure English.”⁶ Héloïse and Abélard was published in February 1921 in a limited edition of 1,500 copies in Britain at a cost of two guineas to subscribers.⁷

Moore followed closely many details of the letters written by the historical Héloïse and Abélard in the 1130s but diverged significantly from the later part of their story. The full account of the lovers’ relationship is given in Abélard’s first letter, Historia calamitatum, which narrates his arrival in Paris and his establishment as master of the cathedral school of Notre Dame; he took lodging with one of the canons, Fulbert, and began an affair...