George Moore’s melodramatic romance novel Evelyn Innes is replete with characters based on real people. The author fashioned Evelyn’s father after the French-born musician Arnold Dolmetsch (1858–1940), who studied Renaissance music and the instruments that produced it in London. A celebrated musician and musicologist, Dolmetsch attracted people from all over the world interested in purchasing his instruments, which included lutes and viols. Irish poet William Butler Yeats, with whom Moore and Edward Martyn formed the Irish Theatre, is said to have bought a Dolmetsch instrument to accompany his poetry readings. James Joyce remarked that he would travel to southern England playing his Dolmetsch lute, although he was unable to obtain one. George Bernard Shaw enthusiastically attended and reported on Dolmetsch’s concerts, and Ezra Pound immortalized him in his poetry.
Moore also shaped Evelyn’s young Celtic lover, Ulick Dean, on Yeats and featured his own great admiration of Honoré Balzac, which earned Moore the nickname “the Irish Balzac,” through literary comments by Evelyn’s older lover, Sir Owen Asher. Asher was modeled on Sir William Eden, whose reputation for aestheticism was emphasized through Asher’s love of art and music. Finally, Moore likely based Evelyn on novelist Pearl Mary Teresa Craigie, who wrote under the pen name John Oliver Hobbes. Moore shared a probable sexual relationship with Craigie, one that she severed. After divorcing her husband, she became devoted to the Catholic Church in 1892, a plotline echoed in Evelyn Innes.
The novel opens in Mr. Innes’s home, where his exasperated thoughts reveal his love of Renaissance music and the instruments that best produced it. Although his own era tends to ignore that music, he perseveres in its support and gains a reputation restoring old instruments such as viols and virginals while acting as organist for the Jesuits in his village of Southwark, England. As he longs for the return of the popularity of 16th-century composers, he also longs for his wife, a singer who died many years before. Innes’s daughter, Evelyn, aspires to be a singer like her mother. While occupying herself singing her father’s music, she dreams of becoming a Wagnerian diva, a plan that will be promoted by Sir Owen Asher, a wealthy, womanizing aristocrat who has become enthralled with Evelyn. Evelyn views Owen as a sophisticated aesthete who stands in exotic contrast to the provincials of her village. Thinking to keep Evelyn as one of his many mistresses, he convinces her to leave her father and accompany him to Paris for operatic training, where he will undertake her education and manage her career. She believes she will one day marry Owen, but not until her career has developed.
A voracious reader of Darwin, Huxley, and Herbert Spencer, Owen revels in quoting Balzac. Owen pronounces Paris Balzac’s town, the writer’s work and its sexual imagery providing a backdrop for Evelyn’s own artistic and sexual awakening. While ardently supporting Evelyn’s development into a world-renowned performer, Owen falls completely in love and asks her to marry him. Ironically, Evelyn is the one who chooses to delay the marriage during their 10-year relationship. She remains faithful to Owen, despite many temptations by other men, until in Italy, she meets the young musician Ulick Dean. Evelyn’s struggle between her loyalty to the devoted Owen and the passion she feels for Ulick fills many subsequent pages. She finally escapes by supporting a Catholic convent concertizing for charity, rejecting her public music career and both of her lovers.
Moore provides an overview of Victorian mores through his shaping of their mixed effect on Evelyn. Religion and morality remain important to Evelyn, but not in a strictly traditional manner. She views fidelity to one man, even outside of the marriage bond, as adhering to religious edict prohibiting adultery. While Owen views religion as repressive and lacks belief in an afterlife, opting for art as his religion, Evelyn views her faith as expressive and even liberating, closely linked to her art. Moore sketches Evelyn as an amazingly independent and sensual woman. While dedicated to her music and self-indulgent with her two lovers, she retains a healthy sense of ethics that will not allow her to leave Owen for Ulick. Moore recounts in detail her struggles between loyalty to Owen and passion for Ulick, resulting in her choice of the freedom from sexual entanglement provided by a Catholic convent and its community of women. He creates a lengthy conversation between Evelyn and a monsignor that allows readers to see her work through her confusion to arrive at a conviction that relieves her conflict. This conveniently allows Evelyn to abandon, or at least delay, her choice between marriage and the single life and provides an opportunity for Moore to write the novel’s sequel, Sister Theresa (1901). Both novels are thought to have been part of one original manuscript in excess of 300,000 words. Moore would later revise the second novel, producing two versions; in the first, Evelyn becomes a nun, while in the second, she leaves the convent, dissatisfied with its spiritual offerings.
Extremely popular when published, the novel eventually went out of print for decades. Its melodramatic plot contributed to its eventual decrease in popularity, but its importance as a step toward the development of the realistic novel revived it. Many aspects of Evelyn Innes prove of interest to feminist critics, including multiple scenes with birds, creatures traditionally symbolic of women. These birds are not caged, but fly freely and sing with abandon, as does Evelyn. When Ulick observes her performance as Isolde, he feels he observes “a soul’s transfiguration,” complete with a sound like wings and a rising “like a lark’s flight.” Later, as Evelyn reads St. Teresa’s Book of Her Life, she feels she stands on a hill watching a wild bird soar with heaven’s light on its back. In addition, Evelyn’s primary interest in her career, rather than in the domestic sphere, contrasts with that of the “typical” woman of her era. In struggling over whether she should leave her father, she thinks that only “study” and “seriousness and fidelity to an idea; fidelity to Owen above all things” proves essential. Her placement of her “idea” above “Owen” proves predictive of her eventual choice of artistic ideals over physical passion.
Issues of power remain important, as evidenced in a later scene that reveals Owen’s premature confidence in Evelyn’s enjoyment of “the gentle imposition of his will,” which “never galled the back that bore it, but lay upon it soft as a silken gown.” Slowly, a gender role reversal occurs, as Evelyn clearly takes charge of herself and of the relationship, earning an admirable income and controlling Owen’s will. He engages in reflection on his image in mirrors, an activity usually reserved for female characters, and he worries that Evelyn will consider herself living in sin, oppressed by a guilt that she never feels. Ironically, she comes simply to accept that she had sinned, with no fear other than that of perhaps losing those she loves. As she comes to doubt her passion for Owen, he declares his more fervently, comparing her to “a marvelous jewel” he had found, emphasizing the traditional male view of females as objects to collect. Additional traditional symbolism of woman as an ocean, the mother of all life, appears within the same scene. Such words suffocate Evelyn, as she matures beyond her need for Owen’s support and then for Ulick as well. Of additional interest to feminist critics is the declaration by Owen’s friend that some type of madness must possess Evelyn to cause her to ask for a separation from Owen after their 10-year relationship. The idea that a woman must suffer from insanity if she rejects the company of men is another tradition of romantic fiction.
By the time Moore wrote Evelyn Innes, he had moved beyond his fascination with Émile Zola, an early influence on his writing that led him to focus on minute physiological details, resulting in a clumsy style. In this novel, his style remained somewhat burdened by a partially successful attempt at a sophisticated tone. Moore believed his focus on art and music would result in a narrative elegance, but he knew too little about both topics. His insertion of technical terminology and attempts at witty, flippant remarks on the part of his characters appears forced and mars his narrative. However, the three years spent in revisions on Evelyn Innes is evident in the novel’s gentle humor and consistent compassion toward its characters. Lionel Stevenson compares Moore to Henry James, as Evelyn Innes deftly shapes a woman in three stages of emotional development: early conflict, self-deception, and eventual graceful acceptance of personal failure.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blood, Brian. “The Dolmetsch Story.” Dolmetsch.com. Available online. 2024. http://www.dolmetsch.com/Dolworks.htm. Downloaded December 20, 2024.
Stevenson, Lionel. The English Novel. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960.
Sutherland, John. The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction. Essex, U.K.: Longmans, 1988.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis
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