User:Arms & Hearts/Esther Waters

For the film adaptation of the film, see Esther Waters (film).

Esther Waters is a novel by George Moore first published in 1894.

Overview

Set in England from the early 1870s onward, the novel is about a pious young woman from a poor working-class family who, while working as a kitchen maid, is seduced by another employee, becomes pregnant, is deserted by her lover, and against all odds decides to raise her child as a single mother. Esther Waters is one of a group of Victorian novels that depict the life of a "fallen woman".

Composition

The idea of writing a novel about servants occurred to Moore soon after A Drama in Muslin (1886) was published. Moore described his original idea for the novel, and his discussions on the topic with a domestic servant, in his Confessions of a Young Man.

In its original form, the choice of subject appealed to Moore for its capacity to shock those he considered philistines, who were unwilling to read novels on topics other than the lives of the upper classes.

In a 1889 letter, Moore declared he was working on "a book about servants", in which the heroine would be a kitchen-maid and the hero a footman. Moore observed that it was commonplace for wealthy people to write about how they are troubled by their servants, and that he proposed to "write how we worry servants." Writing to Clara Lanza in the same year, Moore wrote that in writing the novel he would "bathe [him]self in the simplest and most naïve emotions, the daily bread of humanity.

In 1890, Moore wrote to his brother Maurice George Moore that he did not believe he would ever produce work of "real value", explaining "I have the sentiment of great work but I cannot produce it." Three years later, he wrote again to Maurice that he had "strained every nerve to make [the novel] a masterpiece", and that it would determine the trajectory of his career.

In 1890, Moore described the plot of Esther Waters in a letter to Clara Lanza: "Well, it is about servants—servants devoured by betting. It begins in a house in the country where there are race horses. Towards the end of the book—past the middle—the servants set up a public house. They cannot get custom unless they have betting. Then come the various tragedies of the bar—the hairdresser who cuts his throat—the servant who loses thirty years' character for six shillings—the woman who pledges the plate to give her lover money to bet with. The human drama is the story of the servant girl with an illegitimate child, how she saves the child from the baby farmers, her endless temptations to get rid of it and to steal for it. She succeeds in bringing up her boy, and the last scene is when she is living with her first mistress in the old place, ruined and deserted. The race horses have ruined masters as well as the servants."

In the winter of 1890/91, Moore stopped working on Esther Waters.

In 1891, a piece by Moore appeared in the New Review alongside an article entitled "From the Maid's Point of View", which he drew on in constructing Esther Waters.

By 1892, the novel was once again Moore's prime concern. By August 1893, it was nearly complete and Moore envisioned publication early the following year. The novel was finished by late 1893, and published in March 1894.

In an 1893 letter to his brother, Moore described the almost-complete novel as "the story of the fight of a servant girl for her child's life."

Moore considered titles for the novel including Travellers' Rest and Mother and Child; he settled on Esther Waters after meeting a woman with the name in London.

During a break in the composition of Esther Waters, Moore wrote Vain Fortune, a semi-autobiographical tale of an author whose work is ridiculed in the press and who sets out to write a popular work, at the expense of his artistic integrity.

Writing to his brother Maurice after the novel had been completed but before it was published, Moore described it as his "most serious" attempt at producing "a real piece of literature", but in a letter sent days later he said his prior characterisation had been inaccurate.

When writing, Moore would dictate repeated revisions of his writing to his secretary, finding that the repetition helped him to develop a sense of the scene. After dictating, Moore would amend the typescript by hand, then dictate once more. The Derby Day passage in Esther Waters was revised in this way 40 times.

Background and influences

Moore had previously written about the life of a servant-girl at his London lodgings in his memoir Confessions of a Young Man (1886).

At one point, Moore envisioned a trilogy of novels, in which the narrative about servants that was to become Esther Waters would sit between parts about young men in London and older people experiencing their children growing up.

In A Communication to My Friends, Moore described his motivation for writing Esther Waters as reflecting an interest in the question of whether "servants, who in English literature are never introduced except as comic characters, might not be treated as the principal characters of a novel.

Moore identified Gustave Flaubert as an influence on the novel, describing the scene in which Esther meets her son after a long absence as "pure Flaubert."

Moore saw the novel as an attempt to depict life objectively, similar to Edmond and Jules de Goncourt's Germinie Lacerteux (1865) or Joris-Karl Huysmans' Marthe.

Moore represented Esther Waters as a return to writing on simple, human matters after a period of experimentation.

Brown argues that, when composing Esther Waters, Moore was motivated by a desire to write a work that would appeal to a wide readership and improve his reputation. In a letter to his brother, Maurice George Moore, he expressed hope that the novel would bring him fame.

Moore's decision to end the novel with paragraphs mirroring those of its first chapter was informed by his long-held opinion that English novelists were incapable of properly ending their novels.

In his Figures of Transition: A Study of British Literature at the End of the Nineteenth Century (1939), Granville Hicks notes Moore's own characterisation of Esther Waters as a quintessentially English novel (described by Moore as being "as characteristically English as Don Quixote is Spanish"), but argued that it was influenced as much by Émile Zola and Honoré de Balzac as by Tobias Smollett, Henry Fielding and Charles Dickens.

Moore was inspired by a magazine article about the difficulties experienced by domestic servants.

Moore drew on personal experiences in depicting the world of horse racing, and based several characters on employees of the stables owned by his father, George Henry Moore. As a child, Moore enjoyed a degree of freedom, living among stable-boys who worked for his father and becoming acquainted with the equestrian world, until he began attending school.

Lynn C. Bartlett conjectures that an 1891 article in The New Review, entitled "From the Maid's Point of View" and credited to Maggie Younghusband, was an influence on Esther Waters. In the article, Younghusband describes the injustices experienced by servants, including some aspects close to Esther's experiences, and emphasises her own religious piety.

In a 1968 article, Paul Sporn rejects the suggestion that the novel's baby-farm episode was inspired by the descriptions of the practice in Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857) and Sentimental Education (1869). Sporn argues that the episodes in Flaubert's novels do not directly determine their narrators' perceptions of the morality of the bourgeoisie, as the episode in Esther Waters does, and notes that the rural setting of Flaubert's baby-farms differs from Moore's use of an urban locale. Rather than Flaubert, then, Sporn suggests an 1890 article by Benjamin Waugh, the founder of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which has certain phrases and details in common with Moore's description, is more likely to have been a direct influence on Esther Waters. Nonetheless, Sporn notes, Moore does diverge from Waugh by finding the upper-middle classes to be culpable for baby-farming.

Herbert Howarth noted that Moore had, in his earlier writing about his father and Irish landowners of his generation, described these men's habit of sexually pursuing young female employees or tenants; Howarth suggested that this background contributed to the interest in servants' lives that he displayed in Esher Waters.

Moore based the character of Mr Leopold on his friend Joseph Applely.

Plot summary

Esther Waters is born to hard-working parents who are Plymouth Brethren in Barnstaple, Devon. Her father's premature death prompts her mother to move to London and marry again, but Esther's stepfather turns out to be a hard-drinking bully and wife-beater who forces Esther, a natural beauty, to leave school and go out to work instead, thus greatly reducing her chances of ever learning how to read and write, and Esther remains illiterate all her life.

Her first job outside London is that of a kitchen maid with the Barfields, a nouveau riche family of horse breeders, horse racers and horse betters who live at Woodview near Shoreham. There she meets William Latch, a footman, and is seduced by him. Dreaming of a future with Latch, she is dismayed to find that he is having an affair with the Barfields' niece, who is staying at Woodview. After Latch and his lover have eloped together, Esther stays on at Woodview until she cannot hide her pregnancy any longer. Although she has found a kindred soul in Mrs Barfield, who is also a Plymouth Sister and abhors the betting on horses going on all around her, Esther is dismissed ("I couldn't have kept you on, on account of the bad example to the younger servants") and reluctantly goes back to London.

With the little money she has saved, she can stay in a rented room out of her stepfather's sight. Her mother is pregnant with her eighth child and dies giving birth to it at the same time Esther is at Queen Charlotte's Hospital giving birth to a healthy boy she calls Jackie. Still in confinement, she is visited by her younger sister who asks her for money for her passage to Australia, where her whole family have decided to emigrate. Esther never hears of them again.

Learning that a young mother in her situation can make good money by becoming a wet nurse, Esther leaves her newborn son in the care of a baby farmer and nurses the sickly child of a wealthy woman ("Rich folk don't suckle their own") who, out of fear of infection, forbids Esther any contact with Jack. When, after two long weeks, she finally sees her son again, realises that he is anything but prospering and even believes that his life might be in danger, she immediately takes him with her, terminates her employment without notice and then sees no other way than to "accept the shelter of the workhouse" for herself and Jack.

But Esther is lucky, and after only a few months can leave the workhouse again. She chances upon Mrs Lewis, a lonely widow living in East Dulwich who is both willing and able to raise her boy in her stead, while she herself goes into service again. However, she is not able to really settle down anywhere: either the work is so hard and the hours so long that, fearing for her health, she quits again; or she is dismissed when her employers find out about the existence of her illegitimate son, concluding that she is a "loose" woman who must not work in a respectable household. Later on, while hiding her son's existence, she is fired when the son of the house, in his youthful fervour, makes passes at her and eventually writes her a love letter she cannot read.

Another stroke of luck in her otherwise dreary life is her employment as general servant in West Kensington with Miss Rice, a novelist who is very sympathetic to her problems. While working there, she makes the acquaintance of Fred Parsons, a Plymouth Brother and political agitator, who proposes to Esther at about the same time she bumps into William Latch again while on an errand for her mistress. Latch, who has amassed a small fortune betting on horses and as a bookmaker, is the proprietor of a public house in Soho and has separated from his adulterous wife, waiting for his divorce to be completed. He immediately declares his unceasing love for Esther and urges her to live with him and work behind the bar of his pub. Esther realises that she must make up her mind between the sheltered, serene and religious life Parsons is offering her—which she is really longing for—and sharing the financially secure but turbulent existence of a successful small-time entrepreneur who, as she soon finds out, operates on both sides of the law. Eventually, for the sake of her son's future, she decides to go to Soho with Latch, and after his divorce has come through the couple get married.

A number of years of relative happiness follow. Jack, now in his teens, can be sent off to school, and Esther even has her own servant. But Latch is a gambler, and nothing can stop him from risking most of the money he has in the hope of gaining even more. Illegal betting is conducted in an upstairs private bar, but more and more also across the counter, until the police clamp down on his activities, his licence is revoked, and he has to pay a heavy fine. This coincides with Latch developing a chronic, sometimes bloody, cough, contracting pneumonia, and finally, in his mid-thirties, being diagnosed with tuberculosis ("consumption"). However, rather than not touching what little money he still has for his wife and son's sake, the dying man puts everything on one horse, loses, and dies a few days later.

With Miss Rice also dead, Esther has no place to turn to and again takes on any menial work she can get hold of. Then she remembers Mrs Barfield, contacts her and, when asked to come to Woodview as her servant, gladly accepts while Jack, now old enough to earn his own living, stays behind in London. When she arrives there, Esther finds the once proud estate in a state of absolute disrepair, with Mrs Barfield the only inhabitant. Mistress and maid develop an increasingly intimate relationship with each other and, for the first time in their lives, can practise their religion unhindered. Looking back on her "life of trouble and strife," Esther, now about 40, says she has been able to fulfil her task—to see her boy "settled in life," and thus does not see any reason whatsoever to want to get married again. In the final scene of the novel, Jack, who has become a soldier, visits the two women at Woodview.

Style

Unusually for the period, Esther Waters uses internal monologue and free indirect discourse.

Moore used the scene in which Esther attends a horse race as an experiment in describing the scene while ommitting the horses themselves, the grandstand and the paddock.

Themes

Literacy

Brown argues that "Esther's illiteracy seems to have symbolized for Moore a sort of primordial, almost protoplasmic, strength which would survive all persecutions and outlive her persecutors".

Ohmann argues that Moore ascribes a central role in the novel to ideas concerning the influence of environment and heredity, and describes the representation of gambling as an example of the former: betting, Ohmann argues, is presented as a deleterious "fever" infecting certain spaces.

Publication history and revisions

Ten chapters from the then-incomplete Esther Waters were published in serial form in The Pall Mall Gazette in October 1893, under the title "Pages from the Life of a Workgirl". Moore made several further revisions before the book was published in March 1894. Passages describing Esther's employer upbraiding her for not revealing the existence of her child, two chapters detailing Esther's relationship with Fred, a scene in which Esther finds William visiting their son without her knowledge, dialogue in which William asks Esther to live with him, and a chapter describing Esther's dreams as she chooses between Fred and William, were included for the first time in the book. Other passages appeared in the serialised publication but not the book.

Esther Waters: A Novel was first published by Walter Scott, Ltd. in 1894.

After it first publication in 1894, Moore revised Esther Waters in 1899, 1917 and 1920. In 1920 a limited edition of 750 copies was privately printed by the Society for Irish Folk-Lore.

In a preface to the 1937 edition of the novel, Moore emphasised that he had made only minor stylistic revisions, as the novel's sentiments were specific to the 19th century. Nonetheless, the changes made between 1894 and 1920 numbered in the thousands. In many cases, Moore changed the presentation of details from omniscient narration to presentation from Esther's point of view. Moore also, in places, reframed narrative exposition within dialogue, removed redundancies, ommitted some small details and sought to improve the novel's prose style. No changes were made to the novel's narrative structure or themes.

Describing his process of revising the novel, Moore identified passages he was content with as an exception, and wrote: "Sometimes I stumbled upon a felicity, but most often stumbled a thousand miles from it."

Esther Waters was not as extensively revised as A Mummer's Wife or A Drama in Muslin.

The first edition was dedicated to the author's brother Maurice George Moore.

A new edition was published in 1920, with a number of changes to the writing. The 1920 edition was dedicated to T. W. Rolleston, a fellow Irish Protestant with whom Moore had become friends while in London.

An Italian translation was published in 1934.

Moore was dissatisfied with the two French translations, one of which cut 100 pages from the novel. In Avowals, he likened his treatment by Hachette to the treatment of Ivan Turgenev.

A German edition was overseen by (though not translated by) Moore's friend Max Meyerfeld, and led to the breakdown of their friendship due to Moore's suspicion that the text had been modified; in fact, it followed the English sentence-for-sentence, and Moore apologised to Meyerfeld following a long correspondence.

Critical reception

Contemporary reviews

The novel's reception was generally very positive and contributed significantly to Moore's reputation.

In his memoir A Communication to My Friends (1933), Moore described the novel's reception: "Every paper, high and low, literary and commercial, had the same tale to tell of Esther Waters, that a great novel had just been published; illiterate and literate liked it."

Moore's fellow late nineteenth-century novelist George Gissing wrote there was "some pathos and power in latter part, but miserable writing. The dialogue often grotesquely phrased".

A review in The Academy in 1894 described Moore as an author who tended to take "his own way in the matter of subject and mode of treatment" regardless of prevailing tastes, and noted that in the case of Esther Waters this tendency is vindicated "by fidelity of workmanship and excellence of motive."

The Spectator published a negative review.

Lionel Johnson wrote a positive review in the Daily Chronicle, praising the novel's "synthesis". Hubert Crackanthorpe also praised the novel.

Arthur Quiller-Couch (under his pseudonym "Q") reviewed the book in The Speaker, declaring it "the best book of its kind in the English language" and comparing it favourably to Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbevilles. Moore, who had read Hardy's novel while preparing Esther Waters, was especially pleased with Quiller-Couch's praise.

Andrew Lang wrote that Quiller-Couch's praise for the novel caused him to avoid it, and described the novel's plot as "unidyllic".

Negative reviews were published by Captain Ames, who wrote that books about servants were not of interest to him; David Christie Murray, who found the influence of French authors too apparent, and found Moore lacking in observation; and John Corlett of The Sporting Times, who saw Moore as a pessimistic puritan.

William Ewart Gladstone's approval of the novel was reported in the The Westminster Gazette.

David Christie Murray discussed Esther Waters in My Contemporaries in Fiction (1897), where he compared Moore unfavourably to Thomas Hardy, but found sincerity "faintly perceptible" within the novel. Murray criticises Moore's attention to detail in Esther Waters, identifying a passage describing Esther's bedroom as irrelevant to the plot but significant for its insights into Moore's method. Murray describes Moore as an author who "makes it his business steadfastly to jot down what he sees", an approach that may result in valuable observations but is not the approach of the "natural observer" nor that of the "natural artist". The characters in Esther Waters, Murray writes, are fleshed out in gret detail, but lack "that mystic touch of life which thrills us in the finer sort of fiction." Murray argues that Esther's experiences of maternal longing would, even in the hands of a lesser writer, be emotionally moving, "but, if Mr. Moore feels at all, he is ashamed to show it."

Virginia Woolf reviewed the 1920 Esther Waters in The Times Literary Supplement. Woolf described the novel as "a quiet book, and an old-fashioned rather than an old book", and identified its chief virtue as "a shapeliness which is at once admirable and disconcerting." She praised Moore's dispassionate depiction of poverty and misery, which she argued does not take "refuge in sentiment or in romance". The novel was denied "immortality and greatness", though, Woolf argued, by its lack of emotional depth, but nonetheless held "a very distinguished place in English fiction" and would continue to be read by aspiring novelists in particular. In another essay on Moore, Woolf reiterated that the novel suffered due to Moore's inability to step outside of his own perspective: ""Esther Waters has ... sincerity, shapeliness, style; it has surpassing seriousness and integrity; but because Mr Moore has not the strength to project Esther from himself its virtues collapse and fall about it like a tent with a broken pole."

In her essay "Esther Waters Revisited" (1920), Katherine Mansfield suggested that the 1920 edition of Esther Waters provided an opportunity to consider why Moore's work appeared to have been forgotten. Noting its general acclaim as Moore's best work, the author's own praise for it, Mansfield describes Esther Waters as "on the face of it, a model novel." Noting the novel's scrupulous attention to detail, Mansfield wondered how Moore could have acquired such knowledge of servants' lives "unless he disguised himself as a kitchen-maid and plunged his hands into the cauliflower water". Nonetheless, Mansfield suggests, Esther Waters cannot be considered a "great novel" because it lacks emotion and "the breath of life". Mansfield identifies the passage in which Sarah drinks to excess because the horse on which she has bet has lost as an example of Moore's "cold and toneless" writing which fails to impact upon the reader, and identifies this tendency to convey facts rather than emotions as the cause of Moore's having been forgotten.

George Freeman, in his 1922 study of Moore, argued that while Moore's earlier works should not be seen as mere preparation for Esther Waters, arguing that "Moore's growing experience did not yield its full value until Esther Waters was written, but A Mummer's Wife and A Drama in Muslin stand quite easily by themselves". Freeman identified Esther Waters as a high point in a literary career marked by a number of valuable novels interspersed with less memorable works. Freeman identified Esther Waters as "the most English of all novels" to have been published since Charles Dickens' David Copperfield. Freeman praised the novel for its form, arguing that Moore effected a break from a dominant "formless" tendency in Victorian literature, including Moore's earlier work. The novel's conclusion, Freeman argues, "is a lumnous example of the formalizing effect of unity." Concluding, Freeman declared that "so far as the contemporary novel has been touched by any beauty of form, it may be said that Esther Waters has been the model." Freeman argued that Moore's unusual attentiveness to form was the reason for criticisms of the novel that found it to be cold and distant toward its subjects. The novel does not, Freeman acknowledged, arrive at "passionate heights and deeps", but this is because it does not aim to do so. Freeman also praised Moore's characterisation of Esther who, he argued, "has the literal fidelity of a photograph and the warm animation of a painting."

Moore's friend and collaborator William Butler Yeats discussed Esther Waters in his Dramatis Personae (1935). Yeats argues that Moore's desire to maintain Esther as "a personification of motherly goodness" hinders the novel: describing the passage in which she is tempted to steal a coin but chooses not to, he argues that a writer like Honoré de Balzac would have been able to have the protagonist steal the coin but remain the reader's sympathy. Adrian Frazier described Yeats' commentary on Esther Waters as involving a "self-cancelling act of inflation and demotion."

In his Epitaph on George Moore, Charles Langbridge Morgan wrote that with Esther Waters Moore had "re-created the English novel." Morgan described the novel as a work of "real boldness, real genius". Morgan described the novel as a "realistic masterpiece", though one infused with sentimentality, understood as "a just tenderness and that pity for men and women which springs from perception of the difference between what they are and what they dream themselves to be", rather than sensuality.

James Joyce decribed Esther Waters as "the best novel of modern English life".

Subsequent critics have not typically agreed with claims such as Joyce's, and the novel has rarely been described as a great work.

In a 1936 review of a series of books published by The Bodley Head and Penguin Books, appearing in The New English Weekly, George Orwell described Esther Waters as "far and away the best" of the 10 books in the series. Describing the novel as Moore's best and comparing it to W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, Orwell noted certain stylistic flaws but argued its "fundamental sincerity makes its surface faults almost negligible."

Robert Ross (Robbie Ross?), to whom Moore dedicated the 1918 edition of his A Mummer's Wife, thought that work was more likely to have a lasting legacy than Esther Waters, arguing that while Esther Waters engaged with life's questions on a deeper level, A Mummer's Wife exhibited a valuable youthful vitality.

William Butler Yeats and George William Russell saw Esther Waters as English rather than Irish in sentiments, as it was concerned with social customs rather than spiritual matters.

Sales and circulation

The success of Esther Waters (selling 24,000 copies in 1894), and Gladstone's approval of the novel led to it being accepted by the circulating library of W. H. Smith & Son, with which Moore had previously been at odds.

The circulating libraries of W. H. Smith & Son and Charles Edward Mudie, which had previously banned Moore's work, partially abandoned their bans in response to Esther Waters' success.

Moore found Smith & Son's ban difficult to forgive, and commented on it in his Avowals (1919), in which he also defended the book in terms of the social good it had done. The book, Moore wrote, had "done more to awaken Christian virtue in the heart than any other book".

Esther Waters continued to be read widely in the 1960s, due to the publication of editions by Penguin Books and in the Everyman's Library and Oxford World's Classics series.

Later evaluations

Joseph Warren Beach compared Esther Waters favourably to Edmond and Jules de Goncourt's Germinie Lacerteux (1865), describing Moore's novel as "equally serious in its realism." Beach praised the dignity with which Moore endowed his heroine, through which he suggests "the hardness of life as she experiences it is mitigated for the reader by a sense of the essential fineness of human nature." Beach argued that the novel's single-minded focus on Esther's life produces "a broadening and deepening of the emotional stream", by virtue of which the novel's artistic merit exceeds that of most Victorian novels.

Moore's biographer Joseph Maunsel Hone described the novel as "full of humanity and affection".

Granville Hicks, in his critical appraisal of the novel, compared it favourably to Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, to the literature of the 1890s more broadly, and to Moore's other novels: compared to the decade's other novels, Hicks argued, one "is impressed by the absence of both squeamishness and moralizing". This was due in part to the influence of French novelists: Moore, Hicks argues, "domesticated naturalism by adopting from the French school those elements that could be profitably assimilated by the British tradition". Concluding, Hicks described Esther Waters as Moore's best novel and one that he could not have bettered.

Malcolm Elwin connected Esther Waters to Jude the Obscure, noting that the two novels, published two years apart, both "created a sensation by their outspoken realism." Elwin argued that the novel's narrative "touches the highest sort of beauty, the beauty of humanity; it is told with strict fidelity to reality, without exaggeration or the interpolation of anything foreign to the inevitable course of the narrative", and praised Moore's portrayal of Latch, Esther's husband, in particular. Responding to Freeman and other earlier critics, though, Elwin argues against the claim that Esther Waters constituted a major departure from "formless" earlier English novels, and suggests that it instead constitutes "a milestone in the journey of the novel from its early Victorian to its modern state." Elwin also argues that the novel's "outspoken frankness", and Moore's bravery in producing it, had been overstated, suggesting that Hardy's earlier Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) and Moore's own A Mummer's Wife (1885) were bolder, and that Esther Waters was comparatively more in keeping with dominant ideas of "respectability".

William C. Frierson argued that the use of a heroine, and the choice to give that heroine a happy ending, meant that Esther Waters could not be considered a work of naturalism. Frierson suggested that had Moore "been less great ... he would have written more novels like Esther Waters", and expressed pleasure that he did not do so.

Malcolm Brown characterised Esther Waters and A Mummer's Wife as "two of the dozen most perfectly wrought novels to appear in the English realistic tradition since the high noon of Victorian genius, novels not out of place in the company of the best novels of the language." Brown argued though that, despite Moore's intention to replicate the themes of works such as Edmond and Jules de Goncourt's Germinie Lacerteux (1865) and Joris-Karl Huysmans' Marthe, Esther Waters was in fact closer in tone to George Eliot's Adam Bede (1859) or Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist (1837–39). Brown suggests that, while Moore's original inspiration for the novel had been characterised by a condescending attitude toward domestic servants, the novel itself is broader-minded and more sincere, achieving "a real and original, if incomplete, identification with that remote world of poverty, degradation, and misery." Brown identifies certain passages, including that in which Esther informs Mr. Barfield of her pregnancy, and much of the opening chapters, of "a slight thinness of tone", but argues that the novel demonstrates that Moore's capacities, in certain ways, outstripped those of his contemporaries, including Hardy. Noting the novel's divergence from the plot of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and the Victorian novel more broadly, Brown describes it as "in important ways clearly superior" to Hardy's novel.

Herbert Howarth described Esther Waters as a work in the British tradition of the "philanthropic novel". Howarth described Moore's interest in the character of Esther as paradoxical, given that he (like other novelists of the 1890s) had previously rejected pity and the pursuit of social justice as motiaitons for literature. Howarth noted that Moore had, in his earlier writing about his father and Irish landowners of his generation, described these men's habit of sexually pursuing young female employees or tenants; Howarth suggested that this background contributed to the interest in servants' lives that he displayed in Esher Waters. Howarth argued that Esther Waters' depiction of London indicated the influence of Zola and the Impressionist painters, while the work of William Powell Frith, an opponent of the Impressionists, influenced Moore's Derby Day scene.

Graham Hough identified Esther Waters as "probably the best of the English realist novels" and one of the most important literary phenomena of the 1890s. Hough argued that, despite its setting, the novel had "little of the smell of English literature" and lacked English literature's "bourgeois romanticism", its sober sensibilities being closer to those of French literature.

Enid Starkie characterised Esther Waters as Moore's best work. Starkie argued, though, that the novel owed less to French literature than Moore's other novels, despite similarities to Edmond and Jules de Goncourt's Germinie Lacerteux and Gustave Flaubert's "A Simple Heart", and differed from Moore's earlier work by virtue of its "tender and optimistic" ending.

Milton Chaikin notes the influence of French literary realism on the novel, particularly Flaubert, but finds the novel warmer than Flaubert's and missing his "acrid pessimism". Chaikin criticised aspects of Moore's treatment of the passage of time in the novel, while crediting him with "an unremitting honesty" in psychological matters.

Carol Ohmann argues that the novel reflects the tension between Moore's disparaging comments about Zola's work (which he described as "crude" and "narrow") and the aspects of the work that suggest he was influenced by Zola's proposals for fiction. Ohmann suggests that this reflects a difference between Zola's and Moore's conceptions of the novelist's relation to their times: while Zola sought a "rapport with contemporary life", Moore distanced himself from it.

Douglas A. Hughes described Esther Waters as ""[a] kind of unromantic, urban Tess of the D'Urbervilles". and "a vivid, wholly believable novel dramatizing not only the strength of the maternal instinct but also the resilience of the human spirit."

Peter Ure argued that the esteem afforded to Esther Waters, especially when compared to the similar but less widely-read A Drama in Muslin and A Mummer's Wife, could not be explained by any significant difference in its style or structure. Ure argued that Esther Waters in fact closely resembled the other two novels in its setting and themes, and suggested that ""Esther Waters is a world classic primarily because its heroine seems to us so much nicer than [A Mummer's Wife's] Kate Ede or [A Drama in Muslin's] Alice Barton". Ure identifies the passage in which Esther chooses to return to William rather than marrying Fred as a pivotal moment in the novel, which Ure argues centres on the "affirmation of the personal conscience". Ure suggests that, with this decision, Esther is among the first fictional characters to make the ethical decision to prioritise her connections to others over social mores. This has the effect, Ure argues, that the novel functions as "a mighty quibble on the idea of virtue as defined by Esther's puritanism".

Brian Nicholas idenified Esther Waters as an "interesting failure",, arguing it was not of the same quality as novels such as George Eliot's Adam Bede, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles and D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, but was nonetheless of interest firstly due to its demonstration of the value of the work of Flaubert and Émile Zola, its chief influences, and secondly due to its indication of the differences between the French literature of its time and its British contemporaries. Viewed in this light, Nicholas argues Esther Waters was of interest as both "a curious literary hybrid" and an exemplary novel of the transitional period of the 1890s, in which Victorian attitudes in the arts were replaced with the beliefs of the 20th century. The novel's failure, Nicholas argued, had to do with its unusual portrayal of Esther as "both victim and victor", and was an instance of a creative failure compounded by a technical failure. Esther, Nicholas argued, is a paradoxical character insofar as she is proud, strong-willed and religiously devout, but nonetheless experiences a series of moral lapses, most vitally her rejection of Fred in favour of William.

In his 1999 introduction to the novel, David Skilton notes that Esther Waters differs signifiantly from earlier Victorian novels (such as Charles Dickens' Bleak House and David Copperfield, or George Eliot's Adam Bede) in which a character like Esther—an illiterate "fallen woman" working as a kitchen-maid—would be only a minor character if she were present at all. Skilton notes that while Thomas Hardy was, like Moore, acquainting readers with sympathetic working-class protagonists, Esther Waters nonetheless differs from Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles: unlike Hardy's protagonist, Skilton observes, is not elevated above others in her position, nor is her narrative described in supernatural, classical or Shakespearian terms. Skilton also contrasts the novel with the work of Henry James, noting that Esther, who is illiterate and "limited in her perceptions and understanding", is significantly different from James's narrators, and that Moore exceeds Hardy in the extent to which "he makes his heroine an uncomprehending victim of apparently arbitrary forces", unable to understand her class position. Despite her lack of political awareness, Skilton argues that Esther "derives her strength, her credibility, and her ability to stand" from her ability to simplify moral questions.

Skilton concludes that Esther Waters "is one of the best shaped and most consistently written novels in the language", "one of the truly important and readable novels in the language", "undoubtedly a very fine work" despite its middling reception.

Skilton characterises the novel as "a British naturalization of a French approach" associated in particular with Émile Zola. Skilton suggests that the novel's success was due to its being "sufficiently 'English'" despite Moore's French influences.

Mary Pierse contrasts Esther Waters with Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, published three years earlier but set in an earlier period. Unlike Hardy, Pierse argues, Moore "refuses any aspiration to the grand form of tragedy", and declines to make allusions to classical literature. As such, Pierse notes, Moore's heroine avoids punishment or a similar tragic fate, in contrast to the expectations of the Victorian reading public. Pierse also calls attention to Moore's "unapologetic reproduction of uneducated speech", in which he follows Émile Zola in not distinguishing between the protagonist's language and that of the narrator, and breaks with earlier authors such as Walter Scott, Emily Brontë and Charles Dickens by having his heroine speak in dialect (rather than only secondary characters).

Pierse identifies the trial scene as offering a commentary on the British justice system, the insecure employment of servants, the problem of gambling, and debates within the Liberal Party over alcohol licensing. The judge, Pierse suggests, resembles James Fitzjames Stephen, who was the subject of controversy over his advanced age and perceived class bias.

Pierse cites Moore's use of characters who fail to conform to gender roles, including William Latch and Jim Saunders as bad or absent fathers, Miss Peggy as a sexually liberated woman, Mrs Rivers and Mrs Spires as conniving or violent women, and the butler's homosocial relationships, as a challenge to dominant beliefs about gender. The novel's presentation of a variety of domestic arrangements, Pierse suggests—Esther and the Randals' impoverished homes, the rural calm of the Parsons' home, and the placid homes of the single women Miss Rice and Mrs Barfield—similarly challenge the view the marriage is a necessary social institution.

Pierse reads the novel's conclusion and Jack's military career as a suggestion, in line with Darwinism, "that the 'bastard' is a better being", as well as a subtle criticism of British imperialism and the treatment of soldiers.

Pierse finds in Esther Waters allusions to the work of the philosophers Auguste Comte and Arthur Schopenhauer, the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso and his work on craniometry and phrenology, and the 19th-century fashion for the interpretation of dreams, but argues that none are taken in the novel as sources of absolute truth.

Pierse argues that Esther Waters is a writerly text in the sense suggested by Roland Barthes, and a work of minor literature in the sense suggested by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

Moore's comments on the novel

Moore, seeking in 1893 to explain the "Englishness" of Esther Waters in spite of his own Irish background, argued that his family had only relatively recently moved to Ireland and that his own love of England could be a form of atavism. At the same time, he described that love for England as something "monstrous and preposterous".

Moore identified the passage of the novel describing Esther's only visit to a horse race, with "the sweat and boom of the crowd—the great Cockney holiday", as his favourite part of the novel.

In an 1894 letter to his brother, Moore described Esther Waters as the best of his works.

In a letter to Arthur Quiller-Couch, probably written in 1894, Moore described the novel's final chapters as its best. Moore wrote: "The trouble and stress of Esther's life were bad enough but the real pathos of life seems to me to come when life is no longer an adventure. I do not often shed tears over my own writings but I did shed a few when I wrote the description of the two women walking up the hill and looking at the landscape they have known always".

In an interview with the Daily Chronicle, Moore said the motivation for Esther Waters had been his "love of humanity" and "desire to serve humanity". Later, he would downplay his intention to do good through the novel, but remained proud of the book's broader influence, including the establishment of the Fallowfield Corner Home.

In one preface to the novel, Moore had argued that the novel was not "combative" and was motivated by an insistence on the need to avoid judging others.

Moore wrote that "the germs of all I have written can be found in the Confessions [of a Young Man], Esther Waters, and Modern Painting. cite original source?

Later in life, Moore enjoyed declaring to friends that he had re-read Esther Waters, and that it had "done [him] good". When accused of misanthropy or immorality, Moore reminded critics of Esther Waters.

At other times, though, Moore disparaged the novel, comparing it unfavourably to his other work, expressing disappointment at the prospect that it should be his best-known work, and characterising the character of Esther as tiresome. Moore also feared that the novel gave voice to ideas incompatible with his own views on aesthetics, in particular his belief in the importance of literacy.

Moore viewed Esther Waters as superior to Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, which was published while he was working on the novel. Moore was particularly critical of the passage in which Tess makes a confession to Angel Clare, and tried to construct a similar but superior scene in the passage in which Esther tells Fred that she has a child. More generally, the plot of Esther Waters closely mirrors that of Tess – each concerns a woman who is seduced, but later meets a morally upright man, before her seducer reappears in her life – but whereas Tess depicts its heroine's ruin and revenge in melodramatic terms, Esther Waters breaks new ground by having its heroine return to her first lover.

Influence

Commenting on Esther Waters later in life, Moore expressed satisfaction at having written "the book that among all other books I should have cared most to write, and to have written it so much better than I ever dreamed it could be written" (original source?).

Moore argued that the novel inspired legal action to outlaw baby farming, and proclaimed that the novel, through its depiction of baby farming, "had actually alleviated more material suffering than any novel of its generation."

Esther Waters' influence included the establishment of the Fallowfield Corner Home for Homeless Children, which was founded by a nurse who had been moved by the novel's themes.

Esther Waters also inspired Moore to attempt to write a work on the the hypocrisy of English people. Malcolm Elwin suggests that Moore's failure to write such a work may have resulted from his disappointment following the end of his affair with the author Pearl Craigie. Elwin also argues that the success of Esther Waters led Moore to spend the remainder of his career seeking to produce a novel that would replicate its success.

Elwin found that the novel raised the profile of literary realism,, and argues its influence led "to a loosening of prudery's shackles", and contributed to creating a readership receptive to works such as W. Somerset Maugham's Liza of Lambeth (1897), Arthur Morrison's Tales of Mean Streets (1894) and Richard Whiteing's No. 5 John Street, but argued that the tragedy of Moore's career was his own failure to capitalise on the trend he initiated.

In Moore's life and career

Prior to Esther Waters, Moore had published a string of unsuccessful works.

The success of Esther Waters gave Moore a degree of fame he had long desired, and a degree of financial security he had not previously enjoyed. Moore would complain that, though the novel's success gave him access to luxuries he enjoyed, it nonetheless distanced him from the lives of the poor people it depicts (via Hone). Moore declared: "Esther Waters was a bane—the book snatched me, not only out of that personal poverty which is necessary to the artist, but out of the way of all poverty."

Connection to Moore's other works

In 1894, Moore wrote a preface to an edition of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Poor Folk in which, Brown argues, Moore "explicitly affirm[ed] as doctrine the philosophy of narative implied in the organization of [Esther Waters]."

Brown argues that in Esther Waters, Moore mastered the construction of "semitragic anticlimaxes" that he would later use throughout his work.

While working on Evelyn Innes, Moore wrote to his brother Maurice that he would "do a great book this time or cut the whole thing"; Brown interprets this as indicating dissatisfaction with Esther Waters. In Evelyn Innes, Moore broke with the style Esther Waters shared with A Mummer's Wife. Later, however, Moore deemed Evelyn Innes to be inferior to Esther Waters.

Stage and film adaptations

Further information: Esther Waters (film)

In 1906 Moore first discussed the possibility of a theatrical adaptation of Esther Waters in a 1906 letter to his brother, proposing Yvette Guilbert for the title role.

Later, Lennox Robinson worked on a stage adaptation at Moore's request.

Moore worked on a theatrical adaptation of Esther Waters for five years in the late 1900s, in the hope it would be produced by Herbert Trench at the Theatre Royal Haymarket.

In 1911, George Bernard Shaw recommended the play of Esther Waters to the Stage Society, leading to two performances at the Apollo Theatre. The ending the novel was changed in the adaptation. Freeman described the play as the product of Moore's difficulty staying sufficiently close to the novel while also producing a satisfactory drama, thus lacking an appreciable difference in pitch between acts and maintaining scenes lacking in drama.

Barrett H. Clark recalled discussing another adaptation with Moore in 1920; Clark suggested Moore revisit it, while Moore asked Clark to work on a version. When they met later, Moore credited Clark with inspiring him to carry out the revision, and they agreed that Clark would arrange for productions in the United States which would be credited to the two men. After parting ways, Moore continued to revise the text, resulting in two versions which they agreed they would ask producers to choose between, though Moore continued to encourage Clark to withdraw his version. The unsuccessful collaboration with Clark was Moore's last attempt at a dramatic collaboration.

The reason why Moore chose Esther Waters rather than one of his lesser known novels (which he might have been able to promote that way) to be adapted for the stage may have been its "Englishness". The subject-matter of Esther Waters was the most "English" of his novels, and Moore had just returned to England after abandoning his brief interest in the Irish Renaissance theatre movement. 1911, then, saw the première, at the Apollo Theatre in London's West End, of Esther Waters: a play in five acts, which Moore had adapted from his own novel. Although it did not receive good reviews, Moore was pleased with the production. In 1913 Heinemann published the playscript.

There are, however, two more versions of the play. One was the result of an unsuccessful collaboration, in 1922, between Moore and theatre critic Barrett H. Clark; a third version of the play was written by Clark in the same year, but never performed. The two 1922 versions were first published in 1984.

Esther Waters was filmed in 1948 by Ian Dalrymple and Peter Proud with Kathleen Ryan (in the title role), Dirk Bogarde (as William Latch), Cyril Cusack, Ivor Barnard and Fay Compton. It was partly filmed at Folkington Manor, East Sussex. Two television dramas (miniseries) were produced in 1964 and 1977 respectively.

In 1964 the BBC produced a four-part miniseries of Esther Waters, with Meg Wynn Owen in the title role.

See also

• Women in the Victorian era
• New Woman
• The Millstone (1965), a novel by Margaret Drabble in which unmarried young academic becomes pregnant after a one-night stand in early 1960s London and decides to give birth to her child and raise it herself
• Tales from the Vienna Woods (1931), a play by Ödön von Horváth in which a naive young woman must pay bitterly when she breaks off her reluctant engagement with a butcher after falling in love with a fop who, however, has no serious interest in returning her love
• Therese (1928), a novel by Arthur Schnitzler in which woman toils to provide for her illegitimate son, who in the end turns against her

References

• Atkinson, F. G. (1972). "George Moore and a Literary Friendship of the 'Nineties: Fresh Evidence". Ariel: A Review of International English Literature. 3 (4): 44–49.
• Bartlett, Lynn C. (1966). "Maggie: A New Source for Esther Waters". English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920. 9 (1): 18–20.
• Beach, Joseph Warren (1932). The Twentieth Century Novel: Studies in Technique. Appleton-Century-Crofts.
• Brown, Malcolm (1955). George Moore: A Reconsideration. University of Washington Press. return to (see Bartlett)
• Chaikin, Milton (1968). "George Moore's Early Fiction". In Owens, Graham (ed.). George Moore's Mind and Art. Oliver and Boyd. pp. 21–44.
• Elwin, Malcolm (1939). Old Gods Falling. Collins.
• Frazier, Adrian (2006). "'I No Longer Underrate Him': The Question of Moore's Value". In Pierse, Mary (ed.). George Moore: Artistic Visions and Literary Worlds. Cambridge Scholars Press. pp. 1–11.
• Freeman, John (1922). A Portrait of George Moore in a Study of His Work. D. Appleton and Company.
• Frierson, William C. (1947). "George Moore Compromised with the Victorians". The Trollopian. 1 (4): 37–44. doi:10.2307/3044465. JSTOR 3044465.
• Gettmann, Royal A. (1944). "George Moore's Revisions of The Lake, The Wild Goose, and Esther Waters". Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. 59 (2): 540–555. doi:10.2307/459344.
• Hicks, Granville (1939). Figures of Transition: A Study of British literature at the End of the Nineteenth Century. Macmillan.
• Hone, Joseph (1936). The Life of George Moore. Victor Gollancz Ltd.
• Hough, Graham (1960). Image and Experience: Studies in a Literary Revolution. University of Nebraska Press.
• Howarth, Herbert (1958). The Irish Writers 1880–1940: Literature Under Parnell's Star. Rockliff.
• Hughes, Douglas A. (1971). "Introduction". In Hughes, Douglas A. (ed.). The Man of Wax: Critical Essays on George Moore. New York University Press. pp. v–xxvi.
• Jernigan, Jay (1968). "The Forgotten Serial Version of George Moore's Esther Waters". Nineteenth-Century Fiction. 23 (1): 99–103. doi:10.2307/2932322. JSTOR 2932322.
• Lázaro, Alberto (2006). "The Reception of George Moore in Spain: Silence, Censorship and Distortion". In Pierse, Mary (ed.). George Moore: Artistic Visions and Literary Worlds. Cambridge Scholars Press. pp. 64–74.
• Mansfield, Katherine (1959) [1920]. "Esther Waters Reconsidered". Novels and Novelists. Beacon Press. pp. 233–237.
• Moore, George (1919). Avowals. William Heinemann Ltd.
• Moore, George (1933). A Communication to My Friends. Nonesuch Press.
• Morgan, Charles (1935). Epitaph on George Moore. Macmillan & Co. Ltd.
• Murray, David Christie (1897). My Contemporaries in Fiction. Chatto & Windus.
• * Nicholas, Brian (1971). "The Case of Esther Waters". In Hughes, Douglas A. (ed.). The Man of Wax: Critical Essays on George Moore. New York University Press. pp. 151–183.
• Ohmann, Carol (1970). "George Moore's Esther Waters". Nineteenth-Century Fiction. 25 (2): 174–187. doi:10.2307/2932987. JSTOR 2932987.
• Orwell, George (1968) [1936]. "Review of Penguin Books". In Orwell, Sonia; Angus, Ian (eds.). The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 1: An Age Like This 1920–1940. Penguin. p. 190.
• Owens, Graham (1968). "The Melodic Line in Narrative". In Owens, Graham (ed.). George Moore's Mind and Art. Oliver and Boyd. pp. 99–121.
• Pierse, Mary (2006). "His Father's Son: The Political Inheritance". In Pierse, Mary (ed.). George Moore: Artistic Visions and Literary Worlds. Cambridge Scholars Press. pp. 102–114.
• Skilton, David (1999). Introduction. Esther Waters. By Moore, George. Oxford University Press. pp. vii–xxiv.
• Sporn, Paul (1968). "Esther Waters: The Sources of the Baby-Farm Episode". English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920. 11 (1): 39–42.
• Starkie, Enid (1960). From Gautier to Eliot: The Influence of France on English Literature, 1851–1939. Hutchinson & Co.
• Ure, Peter (1971). "George Moore as Historian of Consciences". In Hughes, Douglas A. (ed.). The Man of Wax: Critical Essays on George Moore. New York University Press. pp. 87–111.
• Woolf, Virginia (29 July 1920). "A Born Writer". The Times Literary Supplement. Retrieved 24 October 2021.
• Woolf, Virginia (1961) [1942]. The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. Penguin.
• Yeats, William Butler (1935). Dramatis Personae. Cuala Press.

External links

• Esther Waters at Project Gutenberg
• Esther Waters public domain audiobook at LibriVox

To read

• https://www.jstor.org/stable/449810 (1973) (W)
• Dunleavy, George Moore: The Artist's Vision, the Storyteller's At (1973)
• https://esirc.emporia.edu/bitstream/handle/123456789/298/127.pdf (1976) Y
• https://search.proquest.com/openview/a60db39c601a78bc8f0351dde1a0cd86/1 (1977) (later a book: https://www.proquest.com/openview/c94a0420cc9f88122f3a6aa11bdef249/1) (RX)
• https://www.jstor.org/stable/1345210 (1978) (W) (Skilton)
• Cave, A Study of the Novels of George Moore (1978) (Skilton)
• Farrow, George Moore (1978) (Skilton)
• Hall, "Esther Waters: An Irish Story" (1980) (Skilton) (RX)
• https://www.jstor.org/stable/27794012 (1981) (W)
• https://muse.jhu.edu/article/374339/summary (1981) (W)
• Dunleavy, George Moore in Perspective (1984) (Skilton)
• https://search.proquest.com/openview/0bd8e75c3fe5298b3d29788660e393fc (1984) (W)
• Mitchell, "Formal Considerations in Esther Waters" (1986)
• https://www.jstor.org/stable/40247196 (1991) (W)
• https://muse.jhu.edu/article/373401/summary (1993) (W) (Skilton)
• https://muse.jhu.edu/article/366864/summary (1995) (W)
• https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00497878.1996.9979117 (1996) (W)
• https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/096394700201100402 (2002) (W)
• Youngkin, Molly (2002) "Men Writing Women: Male Authorship, Narrative Strategies, and Woman's Agency in the Late-Victorian Novel", PhD dissertation (Ohio State University, 2002). Retrieved 19/8/07. Y
• https://muse.jhu.edu/article/367635/summary (2003) (W)
• https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/mono/10.4324/9781315235059-12/late-century-aesthetics-cultural-economy-turf-george-moore-esther-waters-gina-dorr%C3%A9 (2006) (RX)
• Youngkin, Molly (2007) Feminist Realism at the Fin de Siècle: the influence of the Late-Victorian woman’s press on the development of the novel Columbus OH: Ohio State University Press. Excerpt retrieved 19/8/07. (W)
• https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/George_Moore/haQYBwAAQBAJ (2009) (W) 160-71, 211
• https://brill.com/downloadpdf/book/9789401209076/B9789401209076-s016.pdf (2013) (W)
• https://brill.com/downloadpdf/book/9789401209076/B9789401209076-s017.pdf (2013) (W)
• http://web.archive.org/web/20180521144646/https://journals.sfu.ca/vict/index.php/vict/article/download/106/53 (2014) Y
• https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.7591/9780801462382-007/html (2018) (W)
• https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110376715-029/html (2020) (an overview?) (LG)
• https://muse.jhu.edu/article/795515 (2021)

RX

• Walter D. Ferguson, The Influence of Flaubert on George Moore (1934) (Sporn 39)
• Gerber, George Moore in Transition (1968) (Skilton)

Not useful

• Campos, The View of France from Arnold to Bloomsbury (1965) (Skilton) https://archive.org/details/viewoffrancefrom0000camp, possibly only p173