Esther Waters is a novel turned play by George Moore, the novel was first published in 1894. Set in England from the early 1870s onward, Esther Waters is one of a group of Victorian novels that depict the life of a "fallen woman".
George Moore, whose full name is George Augustus Moore, was an Irish author and man of letters. He was born on February 24, 1852, in Ballyglass, County Mayo, and passed away in London, England, on January 21, 1933. He was formerly regarded as a pioneer in the field of fiction, but his significance has diminished with time. Moore hailed from a wealthy Irish Catholic landowner family. He moved to Paris to pursue his dream of becoming a painter when he was 21. Edouard Manet and Moore got along well, and the artist drew three portraits of Moore. His first autobiography, Confessions of a Young Man, is another account of the years in Paris in which he introduced the younger generation in England to his interpretation of fin de siècle decadence (1888). He was one of the earliest English-language naturalist writers to learn from the French realists. The literary critic and biographer Richard Elman claims that Moore's writings had an impact on James Joyce. Moore's work is frequently recognized as the first great contemporary Irish novelist, despite occasionally being seen as being outside the mainstream of both Irish and British literature.