George Moore: Influence and Collaboration ed. by Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn (review)

Irish author George Moore has always been a difficult writer to classify. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, he, at various times, associated with nearly half a dozen literary movements, including decadence, aestheticism, naturalism, the Irish literary revival, and modernism. He would passionately embrace a new current before eventually souring and moving to another. Likewise, Moore freely shifted between the genres of autobiography, criticism, drama, fiction, and poetry, sometimes combining two or more in the same work. In addition, he frequently revised his works, making substantive changes to his texts (and in some cases titles), such as the four editions of Esther Waters (1894). Moore’s changeable nature may have benefited his creativity, but it has proved vexing to literary critics who (let’s be honest) prefer less mercurial authors, those who can be more confidently associated with a smaller number of movements and forms. Thus, in any literary history of the turn of the century, Moore generally rates discussion but usually as a secondary example. For instance, in most histories of naturalism, Moore gets credit for pioneering the naturalist novel in England, but George Gissing usually gets lauded for perfecting the form.

In the past twenty years or so, however, literary scholars have begun to reconsider Moore on his own terms, and Ann Heilmann’s and Mark Llewellyn’s edited collection, George Moore: Influence and Collaboration, joins a growing body of work on this hitherto slighted author. As the editors point out in their very good introduction, several books dedicated to the author have appeared, such as the critical study George Moore and the Autogenous Self: The Autobiography and Fiction (1994) by Elizabeth Grubgeld and the critical biography George Moore, 1852–1933 (2000) by Adrian Frazier (both also contributors to the book under review). More recently, Moore has been the subject of several scholarly conferences, four collections of essays, and editing projects. Heilmann and Llewellyn distinguish their collection from this previous work by focusing on “a sustained interrogation [of Moore’s] interactions with and impact on his literary and artistic contemporaries” (16).

The editors divide the collection into two sections: “Influence,” consisting of eleven chapters, and “Collaboration,” consisting of two scholarly-edited works by Moore. The twelve authors in section one read Moore’s published and unpublished works in order to trace the influences on them of art, culture, literature, and music. Anna Gruetzner Robins’s chapter considers Moore’s changing views of French impressionism from his generally positive English review of the last impressionists’ exhibition (1886) to his novel, Confessions of a Young Man (1888), where the review is “recycled as the basis of a satirical account” of the exhibition to reflect Moore’s new view of the movement (40). In particular, this chapter identifies many of the paintings to which Moore alludes in his works. Two chapters, by Frazier and Michel Brunet, consider the influence of Honoré de Balzac and John Eglington, respectively, on Moore and his works. Frazier, in particular, argues that Moore read Balzac’s novels with the decided aim to learn how to write, but that the influence developed further as a model for his own literary self-fashioning. Musical influences serve as the basis for two further chapters by Mary S. Pierse and Stoddard Martin. The former traces musical comparisons and references across Moore’s oeuvre and the latter investigates the influence of Richard Wagner in Moore’s later career, especially in the novel The Brook Kerith (1916).

The remaining six chapters all consider the influence of various cultural or social forces on Moore’s work. The two chapters by Jane Jordan and Katherine Mullin offer new perspectives on the well-covered history of Moore’s run-in with literary censorship in the late Victorian period. In Literature at Nurse, or Circulation of Morals (1885), Moore decries the inclusion of Ouida’s and other authors’ novels in the circulating library and finds...