Always ambitious, George Moore understood early on in the writing of his third book, ''A Drama in Muslin'', that his chosen topic-the sentimental education of five girls born into the gentry of the West of Ireland-could be expanded to include a study of the social conditions that were currently in place among the Irish people, who were in desperate need of political change and development. The novel, which was written in the middle of the 1880s, captures the unease of the period. The book offers four case studies of Moore's rewriting, with this one being the first. It concentrates on the book ''A Drama in Muslin,'' which has the dual subject of the oppression of Anglo-Irish women by the standards of the so-called "marriage market" and the persecution of Irish tenants by the landlordism system. It evaluates current and contemporary reviews of the book, focusing in particular on Moore's inventive use of internal focalization in the story. It views the novel's revision as a form of Muslin. It examines how Moore's rewriting actions increased the internal focalization of the text as a whole through a number of specific textual comparisons.
George Moore, whose full name is George Augustus Moore, was an Irish author and man of letters. He was born on February 24, 1852, in Ballyglass, County Mayo, and passed away in London, England, on January 21, 1933. He was formerly regarded as a pioneer in the field of fiction, but his significance has diminished with time. Moore hailed from a wealthy Irish Catholic landowner family. He moved to Paris to pursue his dream of becoming a painter when he was 21. Edouard Manet and Moore got along well, and the artist drew three portraits of Moore. His first autobiography, Confessions of a Young Man, is another account of the years in Paris in which he introduced the younger generation in England to his interpretation of fin de siècle decadence (1888). He was one of the earliest English-language naturalist writers to learn from the French realists. The literary critic and biographer Richard Elman claims that Moore's writings had an impact on James Joyce. Moore's work is frequently recognized as the first great contemporary Irish novelist, despite occasionally being seen as being outside the mainstream of both Irish and British literature.
