cover image George Moore, 1852-1933

George Moore, 1852-1933

Adrian Frazier. Yale University Press, $50 (624pp) ISBN 978-0-300-08245-6

A visitor to George Moore's bachelor flat in London in 1896 was astonished to see no books. What did ""G.M."" (as he was known) do with his time? the guest wonderedD""look at his pictures by Manet and Monet, and Morisot? Tread his Aubusson carpet?"" ""O, I write until... dinner,"" Moore said. ""Writing bores me less than anything else."" Along with Shaw, Yeats and others, according to Frazier in this splendid biography, ""Moore was one of the writers of Irish birth who remade English literature at the end of the nineteenth century."" He was one of the first to deliberately fictionalize autobiography and biography in literary form. Again and again, he retold the stories of his past (and seldom the same way)Dhis years at Moore Hall in County Mayo, Impressionist Paris, Victorian London and the Dublin of the Irish literary revival. But Frazier, a professor of English at Union College, argues that Moore's ""chief creation"" was ""George Moore,"" a fictional self that was ""at least in some ways unattractive, even repellent."" Laced with uncommon wit, affection and attention to Moore's failings and absurdities, Frazier's biography, the first since the 1930s, is likely to reverse the long slide Moore's reputation has experienced since his death. Well researched and persuasive, the volume should also return readers to Moore's writingDhis great, Zolaesque novel Esther Waters, his Chekhovian short stories and the ""fabulations of his inescapably literary being"" (as Frazier call them), such as Hail and Farewell and Memoirs of My Dead Life. 31 illus. (June)