Abstract
Esther Waters tells the story of an unmarried mother in Victorian England who survives the social and economic pressures imposed on her. Moore’s choice of a ‘fallen woman’ as the central consciousness was controversial and the novel was banned by a number of booksellers and circulating libraries. Critics have argued that his subsequent rewritings were relatively slight matters of style. However, a pragmatic analysis demonstrates that these apparently slight changes have a significant effect of how the events of the novel are communicated to the reader. In particular, they strengthen the extent to which Esther functions as the focaliser for her own story. Here, Moore’s rewritings appear successfully to enhance the ideological and artistic properties of the first version of his novel.
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Chapman, S. (2020). Esther Waters (1894, 1899 and 1926). In: The Pragmatics of Revision. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41268-5_7
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