In this episode we discuss the controversial and ground-breaking novel, Esther Waters by the Irish novelist George Moore. We are joined by Tom Crewe, author of the prize-winning New Life (Chatto & Windus) and one of this year’s crop of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. Esther Waters was first published in 1894 and is told almost entirely from the point of view of an illiterate working-class woman, who falls pregnant by a fellow servant, is abandoned by him, and decides to raise their child on her own. Telling her story allows Moore to catalogue the glamour and sordidness of 1890s London society in astonishing detail and his refusal to judge his heroine led to it being banned from W.H. Smith’s railway bookstores. Despite (or because of) this, it sold over 24,000 copies in its first year and has been in print ever since. We examine what sets Moore apart from other writers of the time, including Émile Zola, Thomas Hardy and George Gissing, why it has had such a positive influence on later admirers like James Joyce, Jean Rhys and Colm Tóibín, and how its simplicity of style and detailed presentation of Esther’s inner life feel so surprisingly contemporary.

Books mentioned
George Moore - Esther Waters; Confessions of a Young Man; A Drama in Muslin; The Brook Kerith: A Syrian Story
Tom Crewe - New Life
Colm Tóibín - Brooklyn
James Joyce - The Dubliners
Thomas Hardy - Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Kate Chopin - The Awakening
George Gissing - The Odd Women; New Grub Street; In the Year of Jubilee; The Whirlpool
Jean Rhys - Wide Sargasso Sea
Charlotte Brontë - Jane Eyre

Other links
Esther Waters (1948) - film starring Dirk Bogarde