Collected Writings: Olive Moore

English novelist Moore is utterly absent from conventional literary history: her work has never been anthologized, her name appears in virtually no literary ``companions,'' and the years of her birth (c. 1905) and death (c. 1970) are not known for sure. Yet this volume--comprised of three short novels, a collection of notebook entries, and a selection of essays--showcases a writer of resounding eloquence and inspiring audacity. The first novel, the substantially autobiographical Celestial Seraglio , tumbles through the world of a French convent for both Catholic and English Protestant girls. Relationships develop, only to be smashed as adolescent enthusiasms turn from the lives of the saints to the confessional, to cynicism, and again to piety. Spleen recounts the ponderings of Ruth, a woman who has exiled herself to an Italian Mediterranean island following the birth of her deformed son. Her vision of (specifically European) social corruption and artistic vigor is heightened on the island, and when her husband dies, she returns alone to England strangely rejuvenated, ironically triumphant. In Fugue we once again find an Englishwoman abroad, this time in Alsace: Lavinia Reade is pregnant, unmarried, and losing her man. Love, friendship and independence are juggled before the macabre conclusion falls like a shroud. In her fiction, Moore's formal ambitions have a 1920s Modernist character; one is reminded of Virginia Woolf's dense, circular narratives, and in fact both writers lived in London's Bloomsbury. Moore's notebooks reveal this opinionated woman's personal, almost petulant side, which can scintillate as well as aggravate. Her ringing critical insights are too abbreviated, and casual thoughts are rendered too profoundly. But for all the salt one swallows, Moore's incisiveness gleams. She felt a devout responsibility to tell more than stories, yet she is far too sophisticated to sound pedagogic. Her authority springs from a prose that is, after all, delicious, delicate and bracing. (May)