ABSTRACT
Best known for his novel Esther Waters, Anglo-Irish writer George Moore was a focal point for the various aesthetic cross-currents influencing the course of English art and literature at the end of the nineteenth century. This chapter argues that A Mummer's Wife is no mere French copy; that Moore modified the naturalistic formula in this novel in ways that are more subtle and complex than has generally been supposed; and that he wrote an amazingly strong novel in the process, a novel which even more than A Drama in Muslin and Esther Waters has been overlooked by literary historians. The portrayal of sexuality, which marks the widest division between The Doctor's Wife and its French counterparts, constituted one of the main reasons for the banning of A Mummer's Wife by Smith's and Mudie's. Moore's experiment in A Mummer's Wife is thus at least as subtle and complex, both psychologically and artistically, as similar experiments by the naturalists.
