George Moore (1852-1933) was an Irish novelist and man of letters. His first novels, A Modern Lover (1883) and A Mummer’s Wife (1885), introduced a new note of French Naturalism into the English scene, and he later adopted the realistic techniques of Gustave Flaubert and Honoré de Balzac. Esther Waters (1894), one of his best known novels, deals with the plight of a servant girl who has a baby out of wedlock; it is a story of hardship and humiliation illumined by the novelist’s compassion. It was an immediate success, and he followed it with works in a similar vein: Evelyn Innes (1898) and Sister Teresa (1901).

The collection contains a holographic manuscript of a chapter from Parnell and His Island. The material is written in ink and contains Moore's edits. The autobiographical theme of this chapter concerns a poet who returns to Ireland and is confronted not only with the physical deterioration of his family estate, but also the economic despair of his tenant farmers.