Muslin

by George Moore

This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

262 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 17, 2012

About the author

George Augustus Moore 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 Émile Zola. His writings influenced James Joyce, according to the literary critic and biographer Richard Ellmann, and, although Moore's work is sometimes seen as outside the mainstream of both Irish and British literature, he is as often regarded as the first great modern Irish novelist.

Reviews

[Lucy · Rating 2 out of 5]

The best thing about this (PG download to Kindle) was the author's preface which he wrote many years after the novel for a new edition of his work. It makes no sense unless you read it after the novel though, so you need to plough through pages and pages of stuff about Irish landowners and the desperation of upper class women to find husbands. In the preface, he refers to it as a comedy. I'm not sure what is comic about Cecilia and May and their fate, though. Or all the murders and attacks. Or the hideous poverty of the potato-eating peasantry.