1933 Moore was born in 1852 in County Mayo, Ireland, the son of a wealthy Catholic Liberal MP and stable owner (a background which features prominently in Moore’s best-known and finest novel, Esther Waters (1894)). His father died (‘of political frustration’, allegedly) and Moore – already committed to a bohemian life in Paris – came into 12,000 acres of prime Irish property and an income for life. In Paris Moore was absorbed by the new aesthetic doctrines of Impressionism and Naturalism. His hoped-for career as an artist came to nothing.
He returned to Britain and made London his base in 1879. His first novel, A Modern Lover (1883), the story of a young artist in London, was a frank homage to ‘Zola and his odious school’, as the Spectator put it. The hero, Lewis Seymour, callously betrays the three women who sacrifice their virtue to him. A Mummer’s Wife (1883) opened new areas of sexual frankness for the Victorian novel and established Moore as a rebel against the kind of bourgeois decency represented, pre-eminently, by Mudie’s ‘select’ circulating library, which banned the novel.
Moore was deeply affected by the misfortunes of his publisher, Henry Vizetelly. In 1884–5, Vizetelly published five translations of Zola’s fiction, including Nana and L’Assommoir. He continued introducing a shocked British public to the French novelist until 1888, when a translation of La Terre finally incensed the authorities to legal action. Vizetelly pleaded guilty to publishing obscene articles and was fined £100. In 1889, he republished his Zola titles, slightly expurgated by his son Ernest. Again Henry Vizetelly was tried at the Old Bailey and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment. He was 69, and in poor health. His firm collapsed and he died four years later.
Moore supported Vizetelly and continued to emulate Zola. He crusaded, with some success, against the moral hegemony of the lending libraries and what Henry James called ‘the tyranny of the young reader’. Literature, Moore believed, should have the right to bring the occasional blush to a maiden’s cheek. He lived long enough, dying on 21 January 1933, to read Lady Chatterley’s Lover.