George Moore

Born in County Mayo in 1852, George Moore came from an Irish Catholic landed family and first set out to become a painter, studying in Paris in the 1870s. That time in France shaped him deeply: he absorbed modern French fiction and later helped introduce its realism and naturalism to readers in English.

Moore went on to build a varied literary career as a novelist, short-story writer, poet, critic, memoirist, and dramatist. He is especially associated with novels such as A Mummer's Wife and Esther Waters, and with autobiographical writing like Confessions of a Young Man, which drew on his years among artists and writers in Paris and London.

He spent much of his life between Ireland, England, and continental Europe, and his writing often explored religion, art, class, and social change with unusual frankness for its time. Although literary fashions moved on after his death in London in 1933, he remains an important figure in Irish literature and in the development of the modern novel.