The Irish Merchant of Alicante by Michael Gerard, published in 2023
Muriel Barry
Tour Guide, Ballintubber Abbey, Ballintubber, Claremorris, Co. Mayo.
On the back cover, it says ‘This story has all the ingredients to make it an epic historical novel.’ True indeed!
The author follows the lives of ‘George Moore’ through 4 generations. George Moore I of the mid 1700’s who left Ireland to make a new life for himself in Spain & who returned to build magnificent Moore Hall on the shores of Lough Carra, Co Mayo.
His son, George Moore II (The Historian), married Louisa Browne, of Westport House cementing the links between these 2 great Mayo families. He had a great love of literature & amassed an impressive library. He researched & wrote a number of books including one on the British Revolution of 1688 & another on the French Revolution. Their marriage produced 3 sons, the eldest was George Henry Moore III born in 1810.
George Henry III travelled extensively. Later he settled at Moore Hall & established a successful horse breeding & training establishment which gained a great reputation in Ireland & the UK. His horse ‘Coranna’ won the Chester Cup in 1846 & this allowed him to offer famine relief to tenants on his estate.
He had 5 children the eldest of whom was George Moore IV born in 1852, the man to whom this conference is dedicated.
My intention is to summarise the epic story of the Moores contained in this book & to connect the audience with the birth place & final resting place of George Moore IV in Moore Hall, Lough Carra, Co Mayo.
Teaching Esther Waters: A pedagogical case study
Matthew Bradley
Siobhan Chapman
University of Liverpool, UK
In this talk we will reflect on our experiences of teaching Esther Waters on our third year undergraduate module ‘The Fin du Siecle’. Moore is relatively underrepresented on English Literature programmes in the UK. On this module, he is introduced in relation to a number of his contemporaries and to the wider literary and cultural context of the period 1880-1910. In particular, we encourage our students to compare Esther Waters, with which they are unlikely to be familiar, with Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d'Urbervilles, which is more widely known. We approach this comparison using both literary and linguistic methods. In this talk, we will introduce some of the teaching materials we have developed with the aim of promoting discussion of the different choices made by Moore and by Hardy in telling what are in many respects similar stories. We will consider some of the ways in which our students have responded to this introduction to Moore, as evidenced by their reactions in class discussions and by some of the work they have produced for the creative project that forms part of the assessment of the module.
Novels of George Moore: Dull or Brilliant?
Kathi R. Griffin
By critical accounts, author George Moore was both contradictory and experimental, a paradox. In 1907 one reader asks if there are two Moores, one who writes “dull, dull novels and [the other] feverishly brilliant art-criticism.” In a letter to Dujardin (1888), Moore notes the discrepancy between responses to his novel Spring Days, which was “very bad,” then to his article in Quilter, which was a “great success,” raising the question, what did readers expect from his novels? In one essay about Moore, Woolf asserts, “the defects of a novelist may well be the glories of his brother the autobiographer," yet in an essay on reading, she encourages readers to “suspend judgment” of “books of pure imagination,” unlike memoirs, a distinction Moore transgresses in ways that seem to have challenged readers of his later novels.
During the fin de siècle, Hochman (among others) explains, the reader/writer relationship was transforming, and during this time the Irishman Moore was transitioning between French and English literary genres challenging, it seems, the realistic point of view 19th century readers had come to expect. Considering the relational transformation, this presentation will explore rhetorical strategies Moore uses in his novels that may have contributed to readers deeming them dull.
“Neither Man nor Woman, just a Perhapser”: The Transitional Self in “Albert Nobbs”
María Elena Jaime de Pablos
Universidad de Almeria, Spain.
George Moore published “Albert Nobbs” as part of Celibate Lives in 1922. This piece of short narrative tells the story of an illegitimate daughter, whose parents, “grand folk”, hire Mrs Nobbs to raise her in comfort. When they die, the protagonist, having no resources of her own, finds herself forced to accept jobs meant for women, which are so badly paid that she can barely survive. In order to overcome the livelihood threshold and star a new life afresh in patriarchal Victorian culture, she cross-dresses to work as a waiter. By renaming herself as Albert Nobbs, living her life in male disguise and performing a male identity, she ends up regarding herself a man and struggling to get herself a wife.
This paper aims at examining the multiple transitions with which Albert Nobbs experiments during all of her/his life due to differing circumstances. These include transitions between wellbeing and poverty, safety and vulnerability, happiness and distress, morality and pragmatism, feminine and masculine identities, reality and appearance or public and private self.
Trans theories by Jack Halberstam in seminal works such as Female Masculinity (1998), In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (2005) and Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability (2018) inform this work.
Two Lakes: Moore, McGahern and the Rural West
Conor Montague
This paper will explore connections between The Lake and That They May Face The Rising Sun (US title: By the Lake) and suggest that in writing That They May Face The Rising Sun, John McGahern collaborated with his long deceased compatriot to continue weaving thematic threads left hanging in The Lake. McGahern brought these threads together, not so much as a conclusion, but as a final powerful image placed within the context of a dying breath, the passing of the way of life vividly portrayed by Moore in those early years of the twentieth century.
The Lake and That They May Face The Rising Sun are novels of transition, both in how the cultural landscape of the rural west is represented and in how the character arcs of protagonists, Fr. Oliver Gogarty and Joe Ruttledge, are developed. When Gogarty undergoes a symbolic baptism by swimming across the lake, faking his own death, and leaving the only community he’s ever known in search of a new beginning, readers are left wondering what will become of him, and if he will ever return. Perhaps in having Ruttledge return to his own lakeside community, McGahern provides a sequel of sorts.
All Men Are Equal On The Turf and Under It: Gambling in the work of George Moore
Lucy Moreau
University of Liverpool
Horseracing and gambling are a useful linguistic tool with which to examine the relationship between England and Ireland in Irish literature. The sport is a shared symbol of England and Ireland, and its shared vocabulary is well placed to examine the relationship between the two countries via its subtle articulation of proprietorship sovereignty cultural struggle and religion.
Gambling is the node at which social realism and class divide intersection in the novels of George Moore. In Esther Waters Moore recognised that an affiliation with gambling could be used to illustrate class sectarian lines and used it to contextualise his work within social, economic and political history since contemporaneous criticism of the practice hailed it as a symbol of the failure of social advancement in the nineteenth century, a pastime that contributed to societal disintegration and illustrated the separation between social classes. Hail and Farewell used the organisational structure of nineteenth century betting and horseracing to demonstrate the socio-economic rigid determinism that contributed to some of his childhood unhappiness.
This presentation will explore how Moore used the sport of racing to contribute to the debate on nineteenth century attitudes, a century where values and beliefs were in flux and financial struggles were a brutal reality.
Celibacy, Consumerism and Sexual Capital in George Moore’s Mildred Lawson (1895)
Lola O'Sullivan
University of Leipzig
Mildred Lawson (1895) opens George Moore’s fin de siècle Celibates short story collection. It is known for foreshadowing the stream-of-consciousness technique as well as exploring the artist’s relationship to sexuality. At the same time, criticism has tended to focus on its depiction of celibacy and place it within the New Woman narrative; little analysis of sexuality as a commodity or its relationship with capital has been conducted. Using an approach that blends Marxist criticism with Illouz and Kaplan’s concept of sexual capital and Illouz’s use of Durkheim’s anomie, this paper explores how Mildred’s character connects celibacy and consumerism. Arguing tha Mildred Lawson’s chastity can be read as sexual capital, this paper posits that she exploits it in order to demonstrate her negative freedom and maintain dominance. As a result, this leads to a state of anomie, which aligns her more with the dandies of this era than the New Woman, thus making her a transitional mondaine at the interface of the fin de siècle’s conceptions of sex and gender.
The Transitional and the Invariable in George Moore’s Impressions and Opinions
Márta Pellérdi
Pazmany Peter Catholic University, Budapest, Hungary
In the 1880s, when George Moore was experimenting with writing fiction, he already enjoyed an established reputation as an art and literary critic. Moore contributed numerous essays on painting, literature, and theatre to the most distinguished English newspapers and magazines of the period, including The Pall Mall Gazette, Illustrated London News, and The Fortnightly Review. His uncompromising critical views were later reflected in his best novels, such as Esther Waters (1891), and the Irish short stories published in The Untilled Field (1903). Moore collected the articles and essays written in the 1880s in a volume entitled Impressions and Opinions in 1891 and even considered them worthy of republishing two decades later, in 1913. This paper highlights some of Moore’s critical perspectives on literature and the theatre in the collection, which received not only a warm reception from readers but high praise from contemporary reviewers. While the 1880s and early 1890s marked a period of transition for Moore as a novelist, many of the views he expressed in Impressions and Opinions remained consistent throughout the decades of his authorship spanning from the fin de siècle until his death.
Intoxicating Liquids Filling the Female Void in George Moore’s A Mummer’s Wife (1885) and Richard Pryce’s An Evil Spirit (1892)
Akemi Yoshida
Kyoto Prefectural University, Japan
Some notably similar or common elements could be detected in the characterization of Kate in A Mummer’s Wife and Isabel Gordon, the female morphine addict featured in An Evil Spirit. At the outset, they both are respectable members of the English middle class, but they are irresistibly borne downward to the very bottom of the society. Though they are depicted with physiognomies indicating weakness of moral character, foreshadowing their easily succumbing to their doom, the chief cause that fatally compel them to the habituation of the alcohol intake, or morphine injection, seems to be their loneliness and unfulfilled desires.
The texts A Mummer’s Wife and An Evil Spirit, while displaying certain misogynistic fear, have captured the environment which could have driven the heroines to such habituation of necessity. Meanwhile, it could be also argued that they have contributed to the establishment and fixation of stereotypes which, in their turn, would affect the ways people perceive the phenomena concerning addiction, and could even be brought into the medical discourse to assume authority.
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