Muslin

Always ambitious, George Moore understood early on in the writing of his third book, ''A Drama in Muslin'', that his chosen topic-the sentimental education of five girls born into the gentry of the West of Ireland-could be expanded to include a study of the social conditions that were currently in place among the Irish people, who were in desperate need of political change and development. The novel, which was written in the middle of the 1880s, captures the unease of the period. The book offers four case studies of Moore's rewriting, with this one being the first. It concentrates on the book ''A Drama in Muslin,'' which has the dual subject of the oppression of Anglo-Irish women by the standards of the so-called marriage market and the persecution of Irish tenants by the landlordism system. It evaluates current and contemporary reviews of the book, focusing in particular on Moore's inventive use of internal focalization in the story. It views the novel's revision as a form of Muslin. It examines how Moore's rewriting actions increased the internal focalization of the text as a whole through a number of specific textual comparisons.