Product Description
Hail And Farewell! by George Moore is a memoir of Moore’s time in Dublin in the decade prior to the outbreak of the Great War and the Irish Revolution, at the height of what became known as the Celtic Revival. His observations on the great and the good of Irish society whom he encountered upset many of his friends.
Moore was an anti-clerical, agnostic, modernist bohemian excluding him from the mainstream of Irish political, religious and literary thinking. However he played a part with his friend Edward Martyn in the Irish Literary Revival. Ireland was then dominated by a stand off between two conservative forces; the declining Unionist Protestant Anglo-Irish elite and the rising nationalist Irish Catholic middle class. Moore was simultaneously out of step with both British imperialist and Irish Catholic nationalist moral pieties and hypocrisies he cared little for. The work is a revealing insight into Irish life before it was turned upside down by sweeping social and political change. Moore said of the work that ‘ Dublin is now divided into two sets; one half is afraid it will be in the book, and the other is afraid that it won't.’ Moore Hall, Co. Mayo hosted figures such as Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats.
When his father died in 1870 and the young Moore reached adulthood, he handed management of the family estate to his brother Maurice and went to Paris to pursue a career as an artist. There he met impressionist painters such as Renoir, Monet, and Degas. Emile Zola influenced him to become a writer. He made many expatriate friends in London and Paris and his realist prose influenced the writer James Joyce. Moore's style broke many sexual taboos scandalizing conservatives. He also had a long term relationship with the society hostess, Lady Cunard.
