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Reviewed by:
  • George Moore: Dublin, Paris, Hollywood ed. by Conor Montague and Adrian Frazier
  • Adam Parkes (bio)
George Moore: Dublin, Paris, Hollywood, edited by Conor Montague and Adrian Frazier; pp. xviii + 206. Dublin and Portland, OR: Irish Academic Press, 2012, £60.00, £19.99 paper, $89.95, $30.00 paper.

“It was [George] Moore’s own fault that everybody hated him except a few London painters,” W. B. Yeats declared in 1935 (Autobiographies [Scribner, 1999], 320). The mud has stuck. Not that Moore was averse to slinging it about himself; he was notorious for that. But he has paid a heavy price. Since his death in 1933 after a long literary life spanning more than fifty years, many of them spent in Paris as well as London and Dublin, Moore’s role in most influential critical accounts of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature has been marginal at best. He has been the attendant lord of Anglo-Irish modernism.

The last twenty years have seen creditable attempts to push back against the trend set in motion by Yeats, most notably Adrian Frazier’s magisterial biography George [End Page 345] Moore, 1852–1933 (2000) and Elizabeth Grubgeld’s elegant, insightful George Moore and the Autogenous Self: The Autobiography and Fiction (1994). Perhaps it’s inevitable, however, that some efforts to change the critical fortunes of under-appreciated authors will, by exaggerating their importance, err in the opposite direction. That is sometimes the case in George Moore: Dublin, Paris, Hollywood, a collection of papers originally presented at the fourth international George Moore conference in 2010. Hence the unconvincing attempts to prop Moore up as a “prophetic writer” who teaches “valuable lessons” in Conor Montague’s preface (xiv, xvii) and the unlikely claims for “cultural relevance” in Mark Llewellyn’s “George Moore, the Credit Crunch and Cultural Economics” (7). Few readers will be persuaded by Llewellyn’s assertion that Moore’s depiction of Irish migration in The Untilled Field (1903) makes him “a writer for our times” whose “works can contribute to how we might live now through knowing the pertinence of what he knew then” (6, 17). This sounds like academic outreach as overreach: to ask Moore to guide us through our credit-crunched times is to invite him—or any literary author—to fail. But, then, if the point is to secure for Moore “a much more prominent place in the UNESCO Literary Dublin tours and the Discover Ireland marketing of culture, heritage and national narrative,” why care about success (6–7)?

“With the 2012 success of the film Albert Nobbs,” the dust-jacket assures us, “George Moore has re-entered the public consciousness, and interest in his life and work has expanded beyond the confines of academics and lovers of literature. … As well as contributing to an ever-expanding Moore scholarship, this collection provides a taste of what George Moore has to offer the modern reader.” Refraining from such non sequitur (who is the “modern reader” envisaged in those strange sentences if not a reader who doesn’t read?), the best essays in this collection lower their sights and look to the written page. Addressing academics and lovers of literature, they make a case for reading Moore’s books and for considering them alongside works by other writers, especially James Joyce. The Moore/Joyce comparison, much noted in previous scholarship, is rarely to Moore’s advantage, but it allows us to appreciate his significance to modern letters without overselling it. Directly, as in essays by Mark Corcoran-Kelly and Jayne Thomas, or indirectly, as in Montague’s well-researched examination of Moore’s novel The Lake (1905), the comparison with Joyce and other writers sheds light on Moore’s equivocal place in the realist tradition and, more specifically, on the relations in his texts between realism and symbolism. At the same time, these essays enrich our appreciation of Moore as an Irish author while complicating the idea that the Irish Moore (with a little Paris on the side) may be disentangled from the English Moore.

A case in point is Corcoran-Kelly’s chapter, “More Moore in Joyce than Joyce in Moore.” The title is somewhat misleading, as the Joyce in...

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