SOURCE: "Moore on Joyce: The Influence of The Untilled Field on Dubliners," in The Dublin Magazine, Vol. 10, No. 2, Summer, 1973, pp. 61-76.

Not that Joyce was so staggeringly original as he appears in books by students of Joyce. After all, it was only twelve months before (Joyce began Dubliners) that George Moore had published The Untitled Field, and it takes a student of Joyce to ignore a simple fact like that.

—Frank O'Connor, A Short History of Irish Literature

In 1903 a collection of Moore's short stories about Irish life, The Untilled Field, was published. He had taken ten months to write the book and several of the stories had been published independently the previous year. In 1904 Joyce began a series of short stories about Ireland to let the people take 'one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass'. Although these stories did not appear as Dubliners until...