First published in 1903, The Untilled Field, portrayed George Moore's affectionate portraits of Irish rural life. Though modelled initally on Turgenev's Tales of a Sportsman, the stories soon became original inspirations woven out of Moore's memories of the peasants who lived and worked on his family estate in Mayo. Moore took as his theme the pathos of their existence: the bleakness; the imaginative, cultural and emotional austerity that compelled many, often whole parishes, to emigrate and leave their homes in ruins; the indefatigable resilience of those who stayed and endured; and the fragile consolations offered by their religion. The painfulness of his subjects he offset by the gentle humor of his treatment. Moore's apathy to the Catholic clergy was soon to become notorious but the tragomic plight of the parish priest who finds his power and moral authority undermined by the poverty  of his parishioners and the cunning they develop in order to survive provokes in these tales some barbed satire but much compassion and amusement. The delicacy of discrimination, the emotional control that reveals Moore's understanding and pity through a technique of powerful understatement is unusal in his work and unusual too in the tradition of Irish fiction. 

This new printing of the text of the 1931 edition also containsthe texts of 'In the Clay' and 'The Way Back' which Moore ommited from that volume.