Cirrus@Austlit

Moore began writing for publication in the mid-seventies. She was encouraged to write and to publish by her teachers, especially Max Bluestone (Harvard); Dame Leonie Kramer (USyd); and Andrew Bongiorno, her Oberlin College mentor, head of the English Department, and a Dante scholar who thought she should write novels. The usual literary observation about her essays and discursive reflections are that they are prose poems. Her Ph.D. thesis at USyd, later revised and published by UQP, was about moral scruple in the work of Henry James. Moore describes herself as "a peculiarly Jamesian character".