ABSTRACT
Moore has been spoken of as a kind of feminist, and his first major novel shows us a girl breaking resolutely from a life of dead cliché, fixed opinions, casual indifference. Alice Barton in A Drama in Muslin (1886) turns her back on the world of petty privilege and nasty competitiveness that is the world of the Irish landed aristocracy in their decline at the end of the nineteenth century. Moore’s picture of this society, the background to his theme of psychological and feminist liberation in this novel, is a devastating one. The landlord class has given itself over to triviality; and a coarse materialism is evident everywhere, particularly in the marriage market which revolves around Dublin Castle. Girls are trained to disport themselves there, quite shamelessly making the best of their physical attributes-and Moore explicitly connects this crass commoditization of sex with prostitution.
