George Moore

George Augustus Moore was born in the aftermath of the Great Famine in County Mayo, Ireland, the eldest son of a prominent Catholic politician and landlord. Moore, however, was to rebirth himself many times. As he explained in his autobiographies, “I began myself out of nothing, developing from the mere sponge to the vertebrate and upward” and “was at once the sculptor and the block of marble of my own destiny” who at least three times reentered the world “in the womb of a new nationality”. Moore never ceased to wonder how the clumsy red-haired boy from western Ireland, sent home from Oscott as an unteachable dunce, a failed painter and would-be Parisian bohemian, untidy of manner and trapped in a strange