George Moore - Böcker

'I daresay I shall get through my trouble somehow.'Esther Waters is a young, working-class woman with strong religious beliefs who takes a position as a kitchen-maid at a horse-racing estate. She is seduced and abandoned, and forced to support herself and her illegitimate child in any way that she can. The novel depicts with extraordinary candour Esther's struggles against prejudice and injustice, and the growth of her character as she determines to protect her son. Her moving story is set against the backdrop of a world of horse racing, betting, and public houses, whose vivid depiction led James Joyce to call Esther Waters 'the best novel of modern English life'.Controversial and influential on its first appearance in 1894, the book opened up a new direction for the English realist tradition. Unflinching in its depiction of the dark and sordid side of Victorian culture, it remains one of the great novels of London life and labour in the 1890s.ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

George Moore involved W. B. Yeats personally in the revision of a novel of Moore's that contained a character based on Yeats; this involvement led to the pair's collaboration in writing a play based on Diarmuid and Grania, one of the best-known tragic tales of Celtic mythology. At the late stages of composition, the authors decided to add songs, and Edward Elgar provided the music. The play opened at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin on October 21, 1901.Although the collaboration had been difficult—Yeats and Moore disagreed frequently, mainly about style—the production was well received. Controversy arose, however, because English actors played these most Irish of characters. After the play was produced, Yeats, whose commitment had occasionally seemed to waver, defended it against all criticism. The manuscript materials included in the Cornell Yeats edition of Diarmuid and Grania provide a full record of the disputes and revisions that culminated in the final draft. In his Introduction, J. C. C. Mays writes, "If one looks beyond words or passages that can be tagged with an author's name and a specific date, one can see signatures of each author no less clearly than such tags afford and perhaps see each writer more pervasively inhabiting the characters and situations of the play."

Almost fifty years since the anthology's first appearance, it is still the only such one ever attempted. By "pure poetry" Moore meant lasting objects of verbal beauty and imagination that serve no purpose other than poetic enjoyment. Thus this delightful book of selections from both familiar and surprising sources—among others, Ben Jonson, Blake, Tennyson, Poe Walter Savage Landor, and Swinburne.