Evelyn Innes is a love story, the first written in English for three hundred years, and the only one we have in prose narrative. For this assertion not to seem ridiculous it must be remembered that a love story is not one in which love is used as an ingredient; if that were so nearly all novels would be love stories; even Scott's historical novels could not be excluded. In the true love story love is the exclusive theme; and perhaps the reason why...

Esther Waters (1894) is a novel by George Moore. Considered his best novel, it was an immediate critical and commercial success, and has since been adapted several times for theater, film, and television. Like much of Moore's work, Esther Waters shows the influence of French naturalist writer Émile Zola, who sought to portray the influence of heredity and social environment on the lives of characters without shying away from poverty, sex, disease,...

This 1884 novel examines the life of a woman seduced away from her invalid husband by a member of an operetta troupe. Moore's unwavering account of the protagonist's descent into alcoholism-causing her to do unthinkable things-was too brutal, however, for readers of the time. One critic wrote, "A more repulsive story was probably never written." It stands today as one of the first major English-language novels in the realist tradition.

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. This new printing of the...

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,...

Three hundred yards of smooth, broad, white road leading from Henfield, a small town in Sussex. The grasses are lush, and the hedges are tall and luxuriant. Restless boys scramble to and fro, quiet nursemaids loiter, and a vagrant has sat down to rest though the bank is dripping with autumn rain. How fair a prospect of southern England! Land of exquisite homeliness and order; land of town that is country, of country that is town; land of a hundred...