October 1, 1999: Volume 47, Number 4

George Moore Bio Set For Colloquium

Adrian Frazier, professor of English, is about to publish his work of 10 years, a biography of Irish writer George Moore (Yale University Press, London), but not before he tells colleagues how he did it.

Frazier will speak on his biography of Moore in a faculty colloquium on Thursday, Oct. 7, at 11:30 a.m. in the Reamer Auditorium. Lunch will follow in Hale House Dining Room.

Frazier said he chose Moore in part because he is one of the only major figures in Irish literature not to have been treated in a recent biography. The last major one, written by Joseph Hone only three years after Moore's death in 1933, was a success that would ward off others who would have followed in Hone's footsteps, Frazier said.

Moore was a bachelor said to have had relationships with a number of women, some of them fairly famous and prominent, Frazier said. Among them were Lady Cunard, who received thousands of letters from the writer. Since many of Moore's letters were lost or destroyed, stories of his relationship have to be re-created from fragments scattered throughout collections in the U.K. and the U.S., Frazier said.

"In lots of peoples lives, we see family stories," Frazier said. "In Moore's, there is no family, only a cadre of people who took the place of family members."

Though identified as a major figure of Irish literature, Moore repudiated national identity and found national boundaries to be illusory, Frazier said. While at military school, he would look around the classroom wondering on what battlefields his fellow classmates would meet their fate, he said.

Moore, born in 1852, wrote A Modern Lover (1883), A Mummer's Wife (1885), and his autobiographical Confessions of a Young Man (1888) and Hail and Farewell (1911-1914), a memoir of his years as a founding member of the Abbey Theatre.

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