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Rating: 
Summary: An unflinching survey of poverty and survival
Review: An unsentimental (nearly unemotional) survey of poverty’s crushing dehumanization. Born impoverished, the title character is nonetheless raised with a carefully defined sense of morality and self-respect. This is wrung out of her over years of economic exploitation and casual sadism by the moneyed class. By the end of the novel she’s accepting the most degrading misfortune as almost a birthright. The Victorian writing requires careful reading. The paragraph where Esther has premarital sex is so opaque that it’s uncertain what exactly happened until later when the pregnancy is revealed. And certainly the word ‘pregnancy’ isn’t used (“Yes Ma’am, I’m 7 months gone”). Finally a pet peeve about phonetically spelling dialects. Reading dialogue like " ‘e went ‘ome to see ‘is wife, but she locked ‘im out o’ the ‘ouse. " gets mighty tiresome.
Rating:
Summary: First major English realist novel
Review: George Moore was an Irish landowner who received his indoctrination into the world of art and literature in France. His encounter there with the realist movement led to the first three truly realistic (defined as against the prevailing moralism and/or melodrama of Victorian fiction) novels in English literature proper: A Modern Lover, A Mummer's Wife and Esther Waters. Of the three, Esther Waters is the most fully developed and it is certainly the most engaging for a modern reader. In it, a woman has a child out of wedlock, and not only survives (through a variety of trials that are dispassionately but unflinchingly depicted) but in a manner of speaking prospers (Compare this for example with Elizabeth Gaskell's *Ruth*, written some 40+ years earlier). A great read. An important milestone in the transition from moralism to realism in English fiction. An Irish writer who played an important role in the Irish literary renaissance in the early years of the 19th century. Well worth the read.
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