Moore, George Augustus 1852-1933
Irish writer

Born in Ballyglass, County Mayo, the son of a landed gentleman, he was educated at Oscott College, Birmingham, and intended for the army, but soon became an agnostic, abandoned a military career and lived a bohemian life in London and Paris, until Zola's example revealed to him his true m�tier as a novelist of the Realist school. Moore has been credited with introducing this type of fiction into Great Britain with his novels of low life, A Modern Lover (1883), A Mummer's Wife (1885), and others. During the Boer War he sought exile in Ireland where he wrote Evelyn Innes (1898) and Sister Teresa (1901), which reflect his increasing interest in love, theology and the arts, and the stories in An Untilled Field (1903), which mark a move away from his earlier 'sordid' realism. He returned to England early in the century and published his confessions, Memoirs of My Dead Life (1906) and the trilogy Hail and Farewell - Ave (1911), Salve (1912) and Vale (1914) - in which he wrote about his friends and his associates in setting up the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, particularly W B Yeats. His other later works include The Brook Kerith (1916), which relates an apocryphal story of Paul and Jesus Christ among the Essenes, and the mythical Aphrodite in Aulis (1930).

Bibliography: J Hone, The Life of George Moore (1936)