Esther Waters is born to hard-working parents who are Plymouth Brethren in Barnstaple. Her father's premature death prompts her mother to move to London and marry again, but Esther's stepfather turns out to be a hard-drinking bully and wife-beater who forces Esther, a natural beauty, to leave school and go out to work instead, thus greatly reducing her chances of ever learning how to read and write, and Esther remains illiterate all her life. Her first job ("situation") outside London is that of a kitchen maid with the Barfields, a nouveau riche family of horse breeders, horse racers and...

George Augustus Moore (24 February 1852 - 21 January 1933) was an Irish novelist, short-story writer, poet, art critic, memoirist and dramatist. Moore came from a Roman Catholic landed family who lived at Moore Hall in Carra, County Mayo. He originally wanted to be a painter, and studied art in Paris during the 1870s. There, he befriended many of the leading French artists and writers of the day. As a naturalistic writer, he was amongst the first English-language authors to absorb the lessons of the French realists, and was particularly influenced by the works of Emile Zola.His writings...

1916. Irish novelist, playwright, poet and critic, his epic The Brook Kerith begins: It was at the end of a summer evening, long after his usual bedtime, that Joseph, sitting on his grandmother's knee, heard her tell that Kish having lost his asses sent Saul, his son, to seek them in the land of the Benjamites and the land of Shalisha, whither they might have started. But they were not in these lands, Son, she continued, nor in Zulp, whither Saul went afterwards, and being then tired out with looking for them he said to the servant: we shall do well to forget the asses, lest my father should...

Tells of an Irish priest's loss not of faith, but of commitment to the principles fostered in him during his training. It describes his discovery of a more fulfilling religion that celebrates instinct as being man's true mode of communion with his soul, and is also about the satisfactions of living close to nature in Ireland. The atmosphere of the Mayo countryside and the rich historical associations in every church, castle, or abbey, ruin and farmstead, are evoked with a rare skill, subtly illuminating the relationship that Moore takes as his theme between place and the Irish personality....

Originally published in 1903, The Untilled Field proved to be one of Moore's works that pleased Moore best for its affectionate portraits of Irish rural life. Though modeled initially on Turgenev's Tales of a Sportsman, the stories soon became original inspirations woven out of Moore's memories of the peasants who lived and worked on his family estate in Mayo. It is one of the richest and most perfectly written of his works. ........ George Augustus Moore (24 February 1852 - 21 January 1933) was an Irish novelist, short-story writer, poet, art critic, memoirist and dramatist. Moore came from...

Esther Waters (1894) was one of the first English novels to defeat Victorian moral censorship. George Moore's story of a mother's fight for the life of her illegitimate son won Mr Gladstone's approval and was admitted, unaltered, into those bastions of Victorian conformity, the circulating libraries. Esther Waters is forced to leave home and become a servant in a well-to-do household. Seduced in a moment of weakness she has to leave her position and the novel charts her poignant story of poverty and hardship: first the lying-in hospital, then service as a wet-nurse, and even the workhouse as...