The Untilled Field — A Reader’s Guide

(0 User reviews) 1784

In Category - Historical Psychological Social Fiction

Authors: Moore, George, 1852-1933 Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2003 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Ireland -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Ireland -- Emigration and Immigration -- Fiction Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 102,852

Reading time 448 min

Text sections 10

The Untilled Field — A Reader’s Guide can be approached with a clearer sense of reading commitment from its source measurements: 102,852 words, 7 hr 28 min estimated reading time, and 10 detected text sections.

The text analysis averages about 19.4 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.

Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “Ireland -- Social life and customs -- Fiction,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #4034

George Moore's collection of stories set in late 19th-century Ireland, examining emigration, clerical authority, and thwarted artistic ambition through precise, often bleak depictions of rural life.

Editorial Edition Score 4.8/5

★★★★★ ★★★★★

Calculated from edition completeness, EPUB availability, text structure and catalogue metadata. Not a user rating.

How this score is calculated

Description quality20 pts
Title & short description10 pts
Source metadata20 pts
Text length15 pts
Chapters / structure15 pts
EPUB file integrity20 pts

Total of 100 points, scaled to a 2.5-5.0 range. Editions with an empty description or a missing EPUB file are not scored.

Edition quality

File: pg4034

Read the Text

This was the last statue he would do in Ireland. He was leaving Ireland. On this point his mind was made up, and the money he was going to receive for this statue was the money that was going to take him away. He had had enough of a country where there had never been any sculpture or any painting, nor any architecture to signify. They were talking about reviving the Gothic, but Rodney did not believe in their resurrections or in their renaissance or in their anything. "The Gael has had his day. The Gael is passing." Only the night before he and Harding had had a long talk about the Gael, and he had told Harding that he had given up the School of Art, that he was leaving Ireland, and Harding had thought that this was an extreme step, but Rodney had said that he did not want to die, that no one wanted to die less than he did, but he thought he would sooner die than go on teaching. He had made some reputation and had orders that would carry him on for some years, and he was going where he could execute them, to where there were models, to where there was art, to where there was the joy of life, out of a damp religious atmosphere in which nothing flourished but the religious vocation.

"Good Heavens! How happy I was yesterday, full of hope and happiness, my statue finished, and I had arranged to meet Harding in Rome. The blow had fallen in the night. Who had done this? Who had destroyed it?"

He fell into a chair, and sat helpless like his own lay figure. He sat there like one on whom some stupor had fallen, and he was as white as one of the casts; the charwoman had never seen anyone give way like that before, and she withdrew very quietly.

In a little while he got up and mechanically kicked the broken pieces of plaster aside. The charwoman was right, they had broken his sleeping girl: that did not matter much, but the beautiful slenderness, the grace he had caught from Lucy's figure--those slendernesses, those flowing rhythms, all these were gone; the lovely knees were ugly clay. Yes, there was the ruin, the ignoble ruin, and he could not believe in it; he still hoped he would wake and find he had been dreaming, so difficult is it to believe that the living have turned to clay.

In front of him there was the cheval glass, and overcome though he was by misfortune he noticed that he was a small, pale, wiry, and very dark little man, with a large bony forehead. He had seen, strangely enough, such a bumpy forehead, and such narrow eyes in a Florentine bust, and it was some satisfaction to him to see that he was the typical Italian.

"If I had lived three hundred years ago," he said, "I should have been one of Cellini's apprentices."

Continue Reading →

The opening story, "In the Clay," introduces sculptor John Rodney, whose studio is vandalized the morning after he completes a clay group of a mother and child. The destruction is described with stark immediacy: Rodney sees the "lump of clay" on the floor, the modelling stand beside it, and the charwoman picking up fragments of an earlier work. The narrative dwells on his paralysis—"he stood like one dazed by a dream"—and the specific loss of a piece that had not yet been given drapery to transform it into a Virgin and Child. This focus on the moment between creation and ruin, on the raw clay before it becomes sacred iconography, sets a pattern for the collection: Moore repeatedly examines things caught between states—between art and craft, belief and superstition, home and exile.

Clerical Authority and Social Ostracism

In "Julia Cahill's Curse," a priest's sermon from the altar turns a community against a young woman. The narrator hears the story secondhand: the priest called her "the evil spirit that sets men mad," and the people were "more frightened at what they did not understand than at what they did." The result is systematic exclusion—neighbours afraid to buy from her father's shop, boys afraid to speak to her, her own father putting her out. The blind woman who shelters Julia is the only one who resists the priest's pressure. Moore renders the mechanism of ostracism with clinical specificity: a sermon, a rumour, a collective withdrawal of custom and speech. The curse Julia later pronounces—raising both hands to the sun—is presented as a folkloric response to a social expulsion already complete.

Emigration as a Recurring Pattern

Across the excerpts, emigration is not a single event but a repeated structural fact. The boy who tells Julia's story plans to go to America that autumn, saying "It is Life they are seeking." In "A Playhouse in the Waste," the narrator drives through bogland where the road "straggles like a grey thread" past bog-holes and a horse that nearly leaves the road. The landscape itself seems to resist settlement. The collection's catalog subjects—"Ireland -- Emigration and Immigration"—are borne out by these small, cumulative details: a barefoot walk to a railway station, a cart lent for a departure at five in the morning, a woman seen last "standing at the top of the road." Moore does not dramatize the moment of leaving; he shows the conditions that precede it and the stories that persist after.

The Unfinished and the Broken

Rodney's destroyed clay group is the most explicit instance, but the motif recurs. The Virgin and Child is never finished—it remains "a naked girl and her baby" without the drapery that would make it sacred. The sleeping girl from the previous year's exhibition is already broken. In Julia's story, the priest's sermon is described as words "pouring out" beyond what he intended, a kind of verbal excess that cannot be recalled. Even the landscape in "A Playhouse in the Waste" is unfinished: bog-holes, ruts, a road that barely holds. Moore's prose is attentive to these thresholds—between clay and statue, between a girl and a fairy, between a sermon and a curse. The collection's title, The Untilled Field, suggests land not yet broken for planting, and the stories repeatedly return to potential that is thwarted, abandoned, or destroyed before it can bear fruit.

Moore's sentences are plain and declarative, but his scenes accumulate weight through repetition of small, concrete details: a charwoman picking up plaster, a boy believing a story because he "liked to believe it," a horse shying at a bog-hole. Readers attentive to these recurring gestures—the way authority is asserted, the way a community closes ranks, the way a departure is prepared—will find the collection's coherence not in plot but in pattern. The stories reward a slow reading that notices what is left unfinished.

Some books stay with you like a half-remembered dusk, and Moore’s The Untilled Field left that same ache—quiet losses, doors closed softly. It made me think of A Duet, with an Occasional Chorus — Reading Companion, where the silences between two people feel just as heavy, just as tender. I found myself lingering there too.