The Untilled Field

Ireland in a dozen stories: a priest who drives a girl from the parish, an emigrant's letter, a stonecutter, a village where nothing will grow because everyone who could has gone. Moore was an Irish landlord's son who went to Paris to paint, failed, and came back with Zola's method; several of these 1903 stories first appeared in Irish translation, and it is the book that taught Joyce what a Dubliners might look like. Fifty-seven plates from Raeburn to Orpen track the Irish and European portrait across two centuries, the same faces and rooms Moore's priests, exiles and artists move through.