George [Augustus] Moore (1852-1933) was born at Moore Hall, Ballyglass, Co. Mayo, the eldest son of George Henry Moore (d.1870), Nationalist MP, Catholic landowner, racehorse trainer, and one-time friend of Maria Edgeworth, his father in turn having been briefly made President of the Republic of Ireland during the French invasion of 1798 [see United Irishmen]. Moore went briefly to Oscott College, a Catholic minor public school near Birmingham where his father had been a brilliant pupil, but he was asked to leave, not as he later claimed, for a sexual indiscretion and for refusing to accept the school’s religious teachings, but because he needed special tuition in spelling and grammar.

Left unsupervised and largely in the company of stable boys at Moore Hall, he nurtured the ambition of becoming a jockey. Moore moved to London with the family in 1869 when his father regained a seat at Westminster. Though forced to study for the army entrance exam, he was permitted to attend classes in drawing and painting at the same time. Spared a military career by his father’s death, and heir to twelve thousand acres, Moore left for Paris in 1873, determined to be a painter. He attended the École des Beaux Arts before moving to the Acadèmie Julian, where he fell under the spell of the English painter Lewis Weldon Hawkins (Marshall in Confessions of a Young Man).

Slowly Moore came to realize that he had little talent for painting and decided to write instead, beginning by studying nineteenth-century French authors. Balzac he described as the great moral influence of his life, while Gautier’s eroticism and stylistic virtuosity excited him. He met Mallarmé, attended meetings of the Symbolist poets, and began to write poetry. With Bernard Lopez he wrote a verse play entitled Martin Luther. At Mallarmé’s suggestion he went to the Nouvelles Athenes in Montmartre, a cafe and a meeting place for the Impressionists and their friends. There he met Manet (who painted him three times), Degas, Pissarro, Renoir, and Zola.

Poor harvests and rent failures in the west of Ireland forced Moore to return to England in late 1879, where he began to try making money. His collections of verse meeting with no success ( Flowers of Passion, 1878; Pagan Poems, 1881), he turned to prose and resolved to follow Zola’s naturalistic experiments in English. His father’s social concern, shown in his support for the Tenant League [see Land League], was reflected in Moore’s admiration for Zola’s realistic accounts of poverty-stricken and oppressed lives. His first novel, Modern Lover (1883), dealt with the exploitation of women by an unscrupulous artist, and was banned by Mudie’s commercial library.

Undeterred, he brought out A Mummer’s Wife with Henry Vizetelly, Zola’s publisher in English, using a one-volume format aimed at book buyers rather than borrowers. His pamphlet Literature at Nurse (1885) dealt a heavy blow to the three-decker novel of the circulating libraries, and to the censorship they imposed. Moore’s reading of Walter Pater influenced A Drama in Muslin (1886) as did his friendship with a number of intelligent, independent young women, among them Olive Schreiner, Eleanor Marx, and Vernon Lee. The driving force in the novel is, however, his awareness of various forms of social injustice in Ireland.

Moore made yearly visits to Moore Hall, but there he found himself in a changed and changing world. The age of deference was over; he half-feared, half-despised his tenants, and he recognized that landlords like himself had no future. He also returned frequently to Paris, maintaining his contacts with French writers and painters, and visiting exhibitions. As one of the few people in London with first-hand knowledge of the artistic life of France at this period, he began to write about the Impressionist painters, and was among the first to appreciate the poetry of Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Laforgue.

He went to live in Sussex, loving the domesticated countryside and a way of life that contrasted sharply with the bleak grandeur of Co. Mayo and the harsh existence of Irish peasant farmers. A Drama in Muslin, in its depictions of the hypocrisy of landlord society, had annoyed many of his class; he outraged nationalist opinion in Parnell and His Island (1887), a collection of bitterly satirical essays, mixing pity and contempt, with the latter making the stronger impression.

In Confessions of a Young Man (1888) he detached himself even further from the places, people, and ideals of his childhood and youth, striking instead the pose of an aesthete, and recalling Bohemian days in Montmartre, when he kept a python in his apartment. He tried, with a friend, to run a rabbit farm, but neither of them had a head for business and Moore soon escaped to London. Sussex and the Downs nevertheless provided the setting for his next novels, A Mere Accident (1887) and Spring Days (1888), originally intended as part of a series of books about young men which was never to be completed.

Renting rooms in the Temple, Moore began writing articles on literature and art for a number of papers and magazines, later collected as Impressions and Opinions (1889) and Modern Painting (1893). He published two unsuccessful novels, Mike Fletcher (1889) and Vain Fortune (1891), but with the publication of Esther Waters (1894) he established himself as a writer with a keen awareness of the vulnerability of women in society. He made no attempt to repeat his success. Instead he tried his hand as a playwright and continued to experiment with short fiction, as in Celibates (1895), a book of stories about people whom life has overcome. As a result of his relationship with the novelist Pearl Craigie and his enthusiasm for Wagner, he embarked on two musical novels, Evelyn Innes (1898) and Sister Teresa (1901).

Around this time he first met Maud Burke, later Lady Cunard, for whom he was to have a deep and lasting affection, and he began long although never trouble-free friendships with the painters Henry Tonks and Wilson Steer. Other close friends were Arthur Symons, Sir William Eden, and Edward Martyn, his cousin, Galway neighbour, and childhood friend, who introduced him to W. B. Yeats in 1897, when Moore became an unlikely ally in the attempt to establish an Irish national theatre [see Abbey Theatre].

Moore was later to claim that he left England for Ireland because of his disgust over the Boer War but it is more likely that he sensed the need for a change of direction. He liked and was intrigued by Martyn, on whom he had already drawn for characters in his fiction and who was to be a crucial figure in Hail and Farewell (1911-14). Moore had some experience with the Independent Theatre in London and he helped Martyn with his play The Tale of a Town (later rewritten as The Bending of the Bough, 1900). In 1901, he collaborated with Yeats on Diarmuid and Grania. That year he moved to Dublin and took a house in Upper Ely Place.

Relations with colleagues in the theatre soon became strained, however. Moore had little patience with Yeats’s idea of heroic drama and they quarrelled. Though not an Irish speaker himself, he threw himself behind the language movement (forcing his nephews to take lessons), and his failure to find good modern literature in Gaelic led to his writing The Untilled Field (1903) for translation by Tadhg O Donnchadha and others, to be used by the Gaelic League.

He soon came to be considered something of a liability by League members made uneasy by his exuberant temperament and his perceived lack of decorum. In Dublin he actively cultivated and enjoyed a scandalous reputation through his irreverence, his untruthfulness, his self-promotion, and through the incapacity for discretion which inspired Sarah Purser’s remark that `some men kiss and tell, Mr Moore tells and doesn’t kiss’.

Oscar Wilde said of Moore that he conducted his education in public and it is true that with each book he deepened his understanding of himself as well as of its subject. Writing The Untilled Field forced him to analyse the state of Ireland, his motives in returning, and the chances of success for the literary revival. In 1903, wishing to draw attention to the reactionary nature of Irish Catholicism, he declared himself a Protestant in The Irish Times, but this served only to make him an object of ridicule. Moore blamed his indiscretion on his wicked alter ego, whom he liked to call ‘Amico Moorini’, but this was not enough to make amends. In spite of the success of his novel The Lake (1905), in which he dealt earnestly with the subject of belief and religious conviction, he was not forgiven.

In writing this novel Moore developed what he termed the `melodic line’, a self-consciously fluid rhythmic prose based on oral speech patterns, in which the impressions working on the narrator’s consciousness are integrated with his flow of thought. The effect is not unlike the `stream-of-consciousness technique pioneered in Joyce’s Ulysses. Moore’s active participation in the literary movement being over by this date, he determined to write the autobiography of his middle age. He was encouraged by George Russell, who declared that he had always thought Moore’s real mission was to be an Irish Voltaire and expose hypocrisy and pomposity.

Hail and Farewell, his three-volume history of the revival, is his masterpiece. During its composition he caused much unease in Dublin, for as he worked he would read selected passages to friends. The account of family and childhood caused a breach with his brother Maurice which was never fully healed. After the first volume was published ( Ave, 1911), he decided it would be tactless to stay on in Dublin and by the time the others appeared ( Salve, 1912; Vale, 1914), he was again settled in London.

Moore was to spend the remaining twenty-three years of his life at 121 Ebury Street, London. In 1913 he travelled to the Holy Land to research the background for The Brook Kerith (1916), the first of the books of his last period. Amongst these are A Story-teller’s Holiday (1918), Heloïse and Abélard (1921), the conversational memoirs Avowals (1919), and Conversations in Ebury Street (1924). Several of the later works were brought out in expensive limited editions, and all of these display an obsessive attention to form and style. Three of the five stories which make up In Single Strictness (1922) are revisions of earlier work.

With the burning of Moore Hall in February 1923, Moore lost his last link with Ireland and declared it was not a country for a gentleman. He compiled an anthology of Pure Poetry (1924) and translated the third century AD Latin novel by Longus as The Pastoral Loves of Daphnis and Chloe (1930). While writing Aphrodite in Aulis he became ill with uraemia, but he continued working to the end, and at his death was engaged on a further autobiography posthumously published as A Communication to my Friends (1933).

He was a man few liked, but many respected for his relentless effort to unite personal conscience with perfection of style and technique. At his own request his ashes were buried on Castle Island in Lough Carra, across the lake from Moore Hall.

See John Eglinton, ed., Letters from George Moore to Eduouard Dujardin (1929), and Letters of George Moore [to Eglinton] (1942); Helmut E. Gerber, George Moore in Transition : Letters 1894-1910 (1968), and George Moore on Parnassus: Letters 1900-1933 (1988); Joseph M. Hone, The Life of George Moore (1936); Malcolm Brown, George Moore: A Reconsideration (1955); Jean C. Noel, George Moore: L’homme et l’oeuvre (1966); Edwin Gilcher A Bibliography of George Moore (1970), and Supplement (1988); and Richard Cave, A Study of the Novels of George Moore (1978).

A Mummer’s Wife (1885), a novel concerning men’s victimization of women. Kate Edie, wife of a draper in a Staffordshire pottery town, is seduced by a travelling actor, Dick Lennox, and departs with him. He marries her when she becomes pregnant, but there is no work to be had and their life is hard, and when the child dies she alone bears the sense of responsibility. After a period during whch she grows increasingly suspicious of her husband’s association with other women they separate, and, left without a reason for living, she drinks herself to death. The novel was the first of a one-volume series issued by the publisher Vizetelly at the author’s suggestion, in order to break the monopoly of the circulating libraries. Though criticized for its frank depiction of adultery, it served to introduce the naturalistic method of Émile Zola to English readers and sold well.

A Drama in Muslin (1886), a feminist novel narrating the experiences of Alice and Olive Barton, daughters of a Catholic big house family in Co. Galway, who attend the debutantes’ ball at Dublin Castle with their convent-school friends May Gould, Cecilia Cullen, and Violet Scully. Despite its glamour, the Viceregal Court is revealed as a marriage market in which young women’s hopes are exclusively involved with getting engaged before the season closes. Mrs Barton’s mechanical flirtation with Lord Dungory exhibits the man-hunting mentality in an ugly light. When she sets about teaching her girls the necessary cunning, Alice, a sensitive and bookish girl, reacts against the ‘insult offered to her sex’. As things turn out, May is disgraced by pregnancy; Cecilia takes to religion to mask her lesbianism, Olive dismisses her admirer at home in order to become the beauty of the season, and, when she in turn is jilted, she falls ill. Alice meanwhile gets her ‘Diary of a Plain Girl’ published. In nursing Olive, she comes to love the doctor who attends her. They marry quietly and commence a frugal, middle-class existence in London. In several scenes the unaffordable grandeur of the ascendancy in decline is juxtaposed to the menace of a bedraggled Land League peasantry outside their windows.

Parnell and His Island (1887), a revised and expanded edition in translation of a series of articles that Moore wrote for Le Figaro and afterwards published as Terre d’Irlande. A satirical account of various aspects of Irish life, it develops themes and attitudes found in A Drama in Muslin (1887), reproducing conversations and scenes from the novel. A narrator sympathetic to the peasantry is contrasted with Moore himself, a device which allows the author to present conflicting points of view. Irish readers found its harshness hard to forgive, but it presents a Catholic landlord’s view of Land League Ireland and looks forward to Moore’s autobiographical and confessional writings such as Hail and Farewell. As Susan Mitchell remarked, it was written ‘with all the malignity of kinship’.

Confessions of a Young Man (1888) is Moore’s account of his formative years in Paris, when trying to become an artist, and in London after, deciding to be a writer. It tells of his friendships in the Nouvelle Athènes and vividly describes the Impressionist painters Monet, Degas, Manet, Pissaro, Renoir, and Berthe Morisot. Moore discusses and evaluates various writers including Baudelaire, Shelley, Balzac, and Zola, whose notion that naturalistic writing should dispense with imagination had a profound effect on him. The obsessive preoccupation with art is portrayed self-mockingly, as when he complains that the peasants’ refusal to starve back on his estate in Ireland is depriving him of his demi-tasse at Tortini’s. The book concludes with Moore, haggard but alert, writing a novel by an open window.

Vain Fortune (1891), a novel in which Herbert Price, author of a moderately successful play, is struggling to finish another before his money runs out. Saved by a legacy from an elderly uncle he goes to live with the disinherited niece, Emily, and her companion, Julia Bentley, on whom he grows to depend for help with his work. Emily falls in love with him, makes Herbert and Julia promise not to marry, and when they do she kills herself. Herbert admits to himself that he does not love his wife and that he has failed in life. James Joyce admired it and borrowed its ending for ‘The Dead’.

The Strike at Arlingford (1893), a play written for the Independent Theatre Society, London. John Reid, a trade union offical, is organizing a strike at Arlingford Collieries, owned by Lady Anne Travers, a young widow whom he loved when he was her father’s secretary. His passion for her reawakens and she persuades him to oppose the strike. When the miners discover that he has withheld aid from the starving town they attack him. He takes refuge in Lady Anne’s house but, abandoned by her, he commits suicide. Bernard Shaw thought it ‘utter nonsense’.

Esther Waters (1894), a feminist novel concerning a Plymouth Sister whose step-father drives her from home into service. At Woodview, a famous racing-stable, she enjoys the support of her mistress, Mrs Barfield, also a member of the Brethren, but becomes pregnant by William Latch a fellow-servant. She first stays with her drunken step-father, who depletes her scant savings, and then finds she employment as a wet-nurse, leaving her boy with the child-minder Una Spires who provides a service to women in her position by starving their unwanted babies. Recoiling in horror, she manages to raise her child, Jack, deriving strength from her own religious convictions and support from Mrs Parsons and her son Fred, who offers to marry her. Latch, now the owner of a public house and betting shop in Soho, comes back into her life and she goes to live with him. When the pub is raided Latch falls ill and dies, Esther returns to Woodview, and Jack enlists in the army. Following closely on Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), Moore’s novel proved more shocking on account of its revelations about baby-farming. Descriptions of Woodview and of gambling are drawn from personal experience at Moore Hall.

Celibates (1895) a collection of three stories dealing with celibacy, repression, and art. Mildred Lawson’s flirtations with the art world, high society, and men lead only to frustration. John Norton is attracted by young and innocent Kitty and kisses her violently; when subsequently she is raped and dies he accuses himself and renounces the world. Agnes Lahens flees into a convent, shocked and hurt by the immorality of her mother’s world.

Evelyn Innes (1898), the first of pair of novels which tell the story of an opera singer, taking for theme the relationship between sensuality and religious feeling. Evelyn is the daughter of a church organist who has devoted himself to the cause of old music. His friend Sir Owen Asher, a rich dilettante and keen Wagnerian, determines to make her a singer and his mistress. She subsequently falls under the spell of the Irish composer and poet Ulick O’Deane (a character based on W. B. Yeats and George Russell, as Evelyn is based on the writer Pearl Craigie). Persuaded by a priest to give up her immoral life, she enters a convent. In the sequel, Sister Teresa (1901), Evelyn leaves the convent to look after her father but returns when he dies to help the nuns pay convent debts with recitals in the chapel. She experiences doubts, however, losing her voice amid the jealousy of some of the sisters, and decides to leave the convent. In the end she does not do so, a conclusion contrasting with the outcome of The Lake. Moore discarded both novels when preparing the Heinemann edition of his works (1924-33).

The Bending of the Bough (1900), a rewriting Edward Martyn’s play The Tale of the Town in which W. B. Yeats assisted, though the two fell out in the course of collaboration. The town of Northhaven feels it has been swindled in its dealings with richer, more powerful Southhaven, but the aldermen of the Corporation, divided by personal antagonisms and self-interest, are incapable of action. Young Jasper Dean looks like being the leader they need, but he is torn by divided loyalties towards his fiancée on the one hand, and towards his spiritual mentor, Ralph Kirwan, on the other. Yeats wanted to emphasize Dean’s spiritual conflict but Moore wanted to stress the discrepancy between duty and personal fulfilment, especially for women. Lacking dramatic or political focus, the play did not produce the sensation Yeats was hoping for.

The Untilled Field (1903), a volume of short stories set in Co. Mayo and in rural Co. Dublin in the 1880s. First published as An tUr-Ghort (1902) in Irish translations by Tadhg O Donnchadha, and Pádraig Ó Súilleabháin of TCD, the collection arose from Moore’s plan to provide the Gaelic League membership with something distinctly modern to read in Irish. The stories tell of lonely and frustrated people for whom the only escape is rebellion or exile, as well depicting a world of heretofore unexamined lives. Moore’s offering was considered anti-clerical, and Catholic priests are certainly attacked in stories such as ‘The Window’ and ‘Some Parishioners’, though the priest in the former wonders at the visionary happiness he glimpses in an old, half-crazed woman. Again, in ‘A Letter to Rome’ Fr. McTurnan’s idée fixe about the clergy marrying to repopulate a countryside devastated by emigration is compassionately handled by his bishop. Artists are not exempt from criticism, their exploitative natures being illustrated in ‘The Way Back’ (later called ‘Fugitives’ in the collected edition, 1931). Moore’s style is dry and unadorned throughout, the narration conveying the fabric everyday life with close attention to realistic detail. For James Joyce, the details were not precise enough, and Moore’s stories are precursors rather than models for his Dubliners (1914).

The Lake (1905), orginally planned as a story for inclusion in The Untilled Field. When Nora Glynn, the young schoolmistress of Garranard, becomes pregnant, Fr. Oliver Gogarty denounces her from the pulpit. After her departure he begins to have doubts, starts a correspondence, and comes to realize that he is in love with her. Affected by her more liberal and aesthetic outlook, he learns, in illness and distress, that he has lost touch with his instinctive self. He is deeply moved by her dignified epistolary account of the lonely delivery of her baby in a London boarding house. After restless conversations with more conservative priests of varying outlooks (including nationalism and Gaelic League revivalism), he decides to leave for America and, faking a drowning accident by setting his clothes on the shore of Lough Carra, he swims to anonymity and freedom. The novel dramatizes the ‘flux and reflux’ of his feelings using a ‘melodic line’ influenced by the stream of conscious technique pioneered by Edouard Dujardin. Much of its lyric force stems from Moore’s pleasure in rediscovering the beauty of the countryside around his childhood home.

Hail and Farewell, a three-volume comic autobiography by George Moore, comprising Ave (1911), Salve (1912), and Vale (1914), it tells the story of his involvement in the literary revival from 1901 to 1911, though covering some events before and after. The narrative includes a retrospective appraisal of his early life and family, his struggle with Catholic dogmatism, and his championing of the Gaelic League. Crucially, it contains numerous anecdotes and sketches of the forceful and not so forceful personalities involved in what he acknowledged to be a significant cultural movement. Moore’s initial enthusiasm cooled with exposure to the actualities of Irish life, and a growing sense of distance permitted him to re-evaluate his relationship to the country, his susceptability to cultural nationalism, and his capacity for obsessive behaviour.
 The accounts of friendships formed and dissolved are woven together in an impressionistic style uniting an inner monologue with an informal chronicle of events. This ‘melodic line’ moves backwards and forwards in time, allowing for many moving and humorous transitions. Moore is irreverent about the weaknesses of others and surprisingly frank about his own, but he does not indulge in self-pitying confessions. In spite of the vivid descriptions of Dublin society, but he remains a solitary figure throughout. W. B. Yeats, George Russell, Edward Martyn, Lady Gregory, Synge, Sir Horace Plunkett, Douglas Hyde, and others are all portrayed by a storyteller whose perception of human vanity begins and ends with himself, and a mysterious but healing friendship with a lady-friend called ‘Stella’ (Clara Christian) is also recorded. Amongst the most recurrent figures, Russell is treated kindly and Martyn with affection, but Yeats was sufficiently insulted to respond later with a forthright attack on Moore in his own Autobiographies.

<The Brook Kerith (1916), a historical novel by George Moore retelling the life of Jesus from a skeptical standpoint. Instead of dying on the cross, Jesus goes into a coma and is brought back to life by Joseph of Arimethea in a process of psychic regeneration through human healing. The novel depicts his spiritual decline as he moves from the exemplary simplicity of a loving nature to contempt for mens’ venality and the craving for discipleship which led to his crucifixion. Joseph, who is drawn to Jesus as a spiritual leader, eventually takes him to a community of Essenes, where he finds peace. Years later, the evangelist Paul visits the Essenes and meets with the man whose death and resurrection he has made the basis of Jesusian teaching.
 The narration exemplifies the manner that Moore called ‘the melodic line’. Moore’s book is based on a tradition of secular lives of Christ by David Friedrich Strauss (1835) and Ernest Renan (1863), adding more recent theories about the Essene background of Jesus’s mission. Written after his departure from Ireland and partly as an riposte to Catholic dogmatism, it had no discernible influence on Irish religious thinking in the period. In 1911, Moore had written a stage-version of his theme concentrating on Paul’s encounter with Jesus ( The Apostle, 1911) and later revised it as The Passing of the Essenes (1930).

A Story Teller’s Holiday (1918), a collection of stories by George Moore, based on medieval Gaelic tales and on incidents from his own life. The book describes a journey from London to Mayo and back, with tales told by Moore and by the seanchaí [and ferngatherer] Alec Trusselby of poets, monks, and nuns; of love and sexuality; and of the various restrictions imposed on instinct. This free-flowing narrative allows Moore to re-examine tensions between religious orthodoxy and personal freedom, recurrent themes in his Irish works, and to indulge his fondness for Irish literature, folklore, and legend. In the writing he was advised by R. I. Best and James Stephens. This volume was the first of several which Moore published under the imprint of the Society for Irish Folklore, a fictitious organization that allowed allowed him to control production of his books. It was reviled by several Catholic and nationalist readers.

Conversations in Ebury Street (1924), a collection of newspaper and magazine articles by George Moore, reworked and fashioned into a trenchant statement of his artistic opinions. In these pieces he chooses to cast his arguments in the shape of dialogues rather than essays, allowing him to be scandalous, perverse, preposterous even, as in his fulsome praise for Anne Bronte and his disregard for Tolstoy and Dickens. He discusses Balzac and Hardy; the painters Walter Sickert, Henry Tonks, and Wilson Steer; France, and the Ireland of his childhood and the present. Edmund Gosse, a friend and one of its subjects, described the book as capturing ‘with unprecedented rawness, the impact of masterpieces on an impulsive mind’.

Héloise And Abelard (1925), a novel by George Moore drawing upon Peter Abelard’s Historia Calamitatum, and retelling the story of the twelfth-century lovers. Fulbert, Canon of Notre Dame discovers that his neice Héloise knows Latin and invites her to live with him. When Abélard, a famous controversialist, becomes her tutor they fall in love, she becomes pregnant, and they flee to Brittany. Abélard will marry her if the marriage is kept secret, but it becomes public knowledge and Héloise retires to a convent, Abélard to a monastery. Nine years later Héloise learns that Abélard has been castrated at Fulbert’s behest in order to prevent him taking holy orders. She spends the rest of her life in passionate regret, writing her famous letters to him. The subject was also treated by Helen Waddell.

Ulick And Soracha (1926), a historical romance, continuing the partnership between Moore and Alec Trusselby of A Story Teller’s Holiday, it traces Sir Ulick de Burgo’s pursuit of the Princess Soracha against the background of fourteenth-century Ireland, torn by the fierce warfare following the invasion of Edward Bruce in 1315. Moore relied heavily on material from the Irish historian Edmund Curtis and German Irish-language scholar and translator Kuno Meyer, but his book is most notable for the Sancho Panza-like figure of Ulick’s servant, Tadgh O’Dorachy. After revision he included it in later editions of A Story Teller’s Holiday.

Aphrodite in Aulis (1930), a historical novel by George Moore, and his last published work, it is a family saga of ancient Greece set in the Aulis of the fifth century BC. The actor Kebren falls in love with Biote, daughter of the merchant Otanes. Their children, the sculptor Rhesos and the architect Thrassilos, go to Athens where they receive instruction and are employed in completing the Parthenon. The brothers are asked to build a temple to Aphrodite in Aulis and when Rhesos consults the oracle for inspiration he sees a vision of Earine, the girl he will marry, and makes her the model for the goddess. When Phidias, the Athenian master, criticizes the statue for lack of unity, Rhesos defends his realism, a view of art reflecting Moore’s own conviction that it should be rooted in actuality. The novel celebrates the ordinariness of family life across the generations, and its vivid attention to detail reflects Moore’s returning energy as he recovered from an operation.