Aet. 43, to Frank Harris, editor of the Saturday Review. Julia Frankau was the sister of George Moore’s close friend James Davis. Her novel Dr. Phillips: A Maida Vale Idyll (1887) was set in the London suburb where the Davis family lived.
Julia replied to this letter in the Saturday Review (10 August 1895) charging George’s writing was dirty, ungrammatical and uncultivated.
Julia’s son Gilbert Frankau wrote that George Moore “said to me, the first time I ever met him, ‘If your mother had only become my mistress when I asked her to, she would write better English.’ My Aunt Eliza, he further suggested, had enjoyed that unique honour.” (Gilbert Frankau’s Self Portrait, 1940, pages 101-101) .
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