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This page awaits my discovery of a picture. I am posting the page without one in order to draw attention to my search. I believe that a portrait of Emily Lorenz Meyer will come to light.

George’s affectionate letters to Emily Lorenz Meyer, written 1907-1914, are preserved in the National Library of Ireland. At present they are all I know about her.

Biographer Joseph Hone didn’t mention her. Biographer Adrian Frazier wrote that Emily was a Bostonian married to a German in Hamburg. He didn’t supply her maiden name. I was unable to trace her married name in online genealogies.

She was mentioned by David Eakin and Robert Langenfeld in George Moore’s Correspondence with the Mysterious Countess (1984) and by Helmut Gerber in George Moore on Parnassus (1988), in both books without identifying details.

Since there is plenty of room for speculation, I may suppose that Emily was related to Valentin Lorenz Meyer (1817-1901), cofounder in 1840 of Behn Meyer Holding AG in British Singapore. After leaving his partnership with Behn, Valentin married Henriette Sieveking of Hamburg in January 1850; they were to have several children. From 1851-1856 they lived in Liverpool, England, where Valentin operated a company that facilitated emigration to the United States.

By 1867 Valentin Lorenz Meyer was again situated in Hamburg, operating a successful shipping company with business in Britain and the United States. He was a pillar of the Hamburg community until he died at the turn of the century.

I believe that George’s friend Emily Lorenz Meyer married into Valentin’s large family. Lacking her birth year, I suppose she married a grandchild or grand nephew of Valentin; her husband’s father would have been George Moore’s age.

It must also be said that the family of Valentin’s brother Arnold Otto Meyer (1825-1913) is another possibility. He was an art collector, a politician and businessman in Hamburg, as was his son Eduard Lorenz Lorenz-Meyer (1856-1926). I don’t know why the patronym Lorenz was repeated or how it originated.

Eduard was married 11 December 1884 to Alice (1866-1949), the daughter of Hamburg lawyer and senator Ernst Friedrich Sieveking, with whom he had three children. Emily could have been married to one of them.

All we can say for now is that Emily Lorenz Meyer was probably a member of the prominent Lorenz Meyer family of Hamburg. We shall have to keep digging.