A Mummer's Wife

Kate Ede, a draper's wife in the Potteries, runs off with a touring actor and finds the life of a mummer's wife — lodgings, rehearsals, gin. Moore was an Irish landlord's son who went to Paris to paint, failed, and came back with Zola's method instead; this 1885 novel brought French naturalism into English, the circulating libraries banned it, and he answered them with a pamphlet, Literature at Nurse. Fifty-five plates of Victorian painting, from Clausen and Burne-Jones to Leighton, trace the rural and theatrical world Moore's heroine moves through.