George Moore

Although originally a character in Thomas Morton’s play Speed the Plough (1798), Mrs Grundy has enjoyed greater fame as the arbiter of nineteenth-century moral standards. In Mrs Grundy’s Enemies, Anthony Patterson selects for his study a range of authors – including Emile Zola, H G Wells, and George Egerton – who courted controversy with their frank portrayal of sexuality. He discusses how the culture of censorship shaped fiction, and examines the ways in which novelists challenged the dominant conservative ideology. Ultimately, Patterson makes a convincing argument that it was the Realists of the late Victorian era who faced resistance to literary innovation, long before the Modernists of the next century. Indeed, Mrs Grundy’s Enemies was also the title of a novel by George Gissing that remained unpublished after his publisher decided it was morally dubious. ...

A Mummer’s Wife (1885) was my first introduction to George Moore, and I found myself captivated by this intriguing literary figure, who attracted praise and censure in equal measure. W B Yeats found the novel so shocking that he forbade his sister to read it, and the conservative press was almost unanimous in condemning its “coarseness”. Moore’s novel tells the story of Kate Ede, a bored Midlands housewife unhappily married to an asthmatic draper. When Dick Lennox, a handsome travelling actor, comes to lodge with her family, Kate succumbs to temptation, with disastrous consequences. Moore describes in almost unbearable detail Kate’s sense of claustrophobia, disillusionment, and subsequent ignominious descent into alcoholism. 124 years after it was first published, A Mummer’s Wife retains its ability to shock. ...

Sent out to domestic service by her drunken stepfather, Esther Waters is forced to leave a good position after being seduced and abandoned with child by fellow servant, William Latch. Repelled by her family, she struggles with life as a single parent, nursing a rich woman’s baby to the detriment of her own, working eighteen hours a day for a capricious mistress, and even resorting to the workhouse in desperation. Although an occasional character looks upon her kindly, most are out to exploit her weakened state. Her fortunes seem to improve when she finds work with a benevolent novelist and wins the affections of Fred Parsons, a steady and earnest member of the Plymouth Brethren, who believes she has already atoned for her “sin”. Just as she glimpses the prospect of security, William Latch reappears, begging her to come back to him so that he can be a father to his child. Esther must choose between the safe option of Fred and the more exciting, but dangerous, alternative offered by William. ...