SOURCE: "The 'Wedding Gown' Group in George Moore's The Unfilled Field," in Éire-Ireland, Vol. VIII, No. 4, 1973, pp. 70-83.

In the following essay, Newell discusses the four short stories that comprise the "wedding gown" group, pieces linked by their non-polemic treatment of Irish life, maintaining that these stories "embody not only the strangeness and pathos of human existence but also varieties, both literal and figurative, of 'exile ' and 'vision. ' "

In George Moore's short-story collection The Unfilled Field (1903), "The Wedding Gown," "The Clerk's Quest," "Alms-Giving," and "So on He Fares" form a group separate from the other stories though related to them. Only the above four were appropriate to Moore's original plan—"a volume of short stories about Irish life" to be modeled on Turgenev's stories, translated into Gaelic, published in the Jesuit New Ireland Review, and then used as school texts. "There is no modern fiction in...