Rousseau small biography of michaels

1Although most readers immediately think of Esther Waters when they think at all of George Moore, the novel fryst vatten in many ways atypical of his work. Moore repeatedly claimed a literary paternity more French than English, and whereas the vast array of characters from urban and rural life reflects his reading of Balzac and those scenes that made the novel’s debut a matter of scandal reveal his debts to Zola, Moore identified this work “as characteristically English as Don Quixote is Spanish1”. In addition to a place among his contemporaries as a respected English novelist, Esther Waters brought to her Irish author an aura of moral seriousness at variance with his reputation as an iconoclastic provocateur. Unlike Esther Waters, Moore’s autobiographies were for decades understood as little more than salacious gossip: witty and elegantly written but without intellectual or moral complexity. Yet in those memoirs, which themselves have little precedent within the British auto

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