Edith Somerville and Violet Martin (who would write and publish as Martin Ross) first met on a Sunday morning in January 1886 at St Barrahane’s church in west Cork. Looking back at this encounter with her cousin and collaborator, Edith Somerville described it as “the hinge of my life – the place where my fate and hers turned over”.
It might seem almost too neat – two cousins, both daughters of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, meeting amid the settled world of Church of Ireland worship in a small coastal community. Yet their lives had been quite different. Martin Ross left her family home in Connemara at age 10 when her brother inherited an already broken-up estate and leased out the house. Born into more secure circumstances, Edith Somerville was on her way to Paris to study painting when the two met. They went on to have a successful writing relationship that relied on their ability to bring Irish people and places to vivid life.
Both knew the rigid codes of an elite Anglo-Irish world while living its unsettled future. Their contemporary Stephen Gwynn described that culture as false, arranged according to a hollow and useless hierarchy whereby charming and useless aristocrats relied upon the ability of “marvellous” peasants to pay their rents. The only real money that flowed to the landlords came from remittances sent home to their tenants by American emigrants, said Gwynn, and all shared in the miserable business “of rolling the pitiless stone up the never-ending hill”.
In A Misdeal, a poor farmer named McCarthy has ‘three fine lumps of daughters in America paying his rent for him’
His account glides over the violent, intense and prolonged conflicts of the Land War, but it is wholly and recognisably a description of the world imagined in Somerville and Ross’s great creation, The Irish RM. The stories are almost entirely concerned with the doings of Skebawn in southwestern Ireland and its surroundings but America is the next parish. In A Misdeal, a poor farmer named McCarthy has “three fine lumps of daughters in America paying his rent for him” while even the redoubtable Mrs Cadogan, the housekeeper, has been to America by ocean liner.
Some pleasures might of course be enjoyed while rolling the stone up the hill. In The Irish RM, these take the form of horses, fox hunting, drink, picnics, money-making schemes, long yarns and frequent practical jokes. The adventures of the Irish Resident Magistrate, Major Yeates, were originally published monthly in the Badminton Magazine from 1898 (alongside stories about golf, rugby, fishing and shooting) and then brought vividly to life on television screens in the early 1980s. Each successive short tale offers a dazzling succession of quick-fire dialogue and sudden turnabouts of fortune. Perennially present is Major Yeates’s all too unreliable adviser in local matters, Flurry Knox. Yeates’s long-suffering wife, Phillipa, meanwhile, learns Irish, hosts parties and proves an excellent horsewoman.
A cousin of Edith Somerville’s recently returned from the South African war told her that, when a copy of The Irish RM was found on the body of a dead Boer, the British troops concluded that “he died of laughter” and adopted the stories as “the camp bible”. The later stories have Flurry Knox going to fight in that same conflict and, on his return, the dense social ironies of Skebawn life begin to run on darker lines.
A final story, The Whiteboys, borrows a name resonant with an earlier history of Irish rural resistance for a pack of bloodthirsty white hounds that run wild across the countryside, “roaring” and “screeching” and killing sheep. When Major Yeates attempts to figure out the eventual fate of the dogs, he is answered by a few non-committal words from Flurry Knox who looks at him “with an eye that was like a stone wall with broken glass on top”. It is not a bad characterisation of the tough, roving humour of these sharply observed stories.
A stern critic of their class outlook and ‘garrison’ mentality, McCarthy could not help but admire the dense social detail and ‘demoniac energy’ of The Irish RM stories
In 1901, Edith Somerville wrote to Martin Ross to say that she had heard of “a very smart lady going to Ireland for the first time” who thought that the book provided a guide as to “how one should talk to the Irish”. They thought the idea hilarious because for them the point was not to talk but rather to pay attention. Somerville and Ross had, as the Irish nationalist critic BG McCarthy said “a genius for listening”. A stern critic of their class outlook and “garrison” mentality, McCarthy could not help but admire the dense social detail and “demoniac energy” of The Irish RM stories. In particular, she liked their plain way of making Irish speech seem familiar on the printed page and the avoidance of phonetic spelling.
Somerville and Ross themselves deplored the earlier fictions of William Carleton for his mangling of dialect on the page. But they were probably also uneasy in the face of the authority of a writer who was born the son of poor Catholics and who could claim to represent the people as they really were. Somerville and Ross tried to stay aside from the fierce debates about authenticity in Irish culture that raged during their lifetimes.
Edith Somerville turned down Douglas Hyde’s request that she collect and compile folklore among the peasantry of Munster in 1897 and Martin Ross said no when asked by Lady Gregory if the pair would write a “shoneen” play for the Abbey, one that would dramatise and make fun of “middle-class vulgarity”. They had other plans and in any case, their interest in the curiosities of language had begun not with their tenants but among their own class whose verbal peculiarities they noted in an informal dictionary of family speech.
The results of such scrutiny are brilliantly realised in The Real Charlotte (1894), a terse, tough novel that tells the story of clever, greedy Charlotte and her pretty first cousin once removed, Francie. Charlotte, the daughter of the former agent for the Dysart estates, has a long-standing crush on the current agent, handsome and married Roderick Lambert. But Roderick desires Francie who in her turn falls headlong for a heedless army officer, Captain Hawkins. When Francie’s flirtations become public and she turns down an offer from the eligible if underwhelming heir to the Dysart estate, Charlotte exiles her from the comforts of Lismoyle and returns her to family in their shabby villa in Bray.
Through these crossed lines of desire run plots to do with money, land and resources. The Dysarts are at the social and financial apex of The Real Charlotte but the novel was published just after a decade or so of intense land agitation in Ireland with the end of the landlords and their agents now in sight. And the Anglo-Irish ascendancy had been almost a century in decline. It had lost its parliament with the Act of Union in 1800, seen its power eroded by a series of central state initiatives in policing, justice, education and poor relief and the disestablishment of its church, all before 1870.
Themselves daughters of houses they could never inherit, Somerville and Ross both helped to support their families through their writing
Violet Martin’s brother Robert had already rented out their family estates on his inheritance and made money as a performer and composer of comic songs, many of which lampooned Irish land agitation (Ballyhooley was one of his hits). Somerville and Ross register the realities of this changing world in their depiction of Charlotte Mullen as a type of strong farmer, wealthy in her own right and able to wreak financial ruin on others. Themselves daughters of houses they could never inherit, Somerville and Ross both helped to support their families through their writing.
Men as well as money were among the scarce resources of the place, as the landlord class looked to the military or went to serve as imperial bureaucrats. Edith Somerville wrote to Martin Ross how, at a dance in west Cork, there were no men who could dance and also, there were no men. “I never knew the country so bereft of men or so peopled with girls!” moans Lady Dysart at a tennis party. Their world is that imagined by George Moore in A Drama in Muslin (1882) in which young Anglo-Irish women – “muslin martyrs” – seek marriages among a declining population of their own sort.
Like Moore, Somerville and Ross find in this scanty and waning world the stuff of fierce desire, often brought sharply into view by a sudden shift of perspective. Throughout their books, the hard looks of tenants, grimaces of servants and offbeat points of view of birds and animals command attention. In this, they draw on a long-time Somerville family obsession with the possibilities of photographic art. Edith Somerville’s uncle, Sir John Joscelyn Coghill, was a founder member of the Dublin Photographic Society in the 1850s and taught photography to the next generation.
Their sense of what might be achieved via different visual frames can be seen in a sensational chapter of The Real Charlotte devoted to the Irish mailboat, a routine aspect of Anglo-Irish life that they bring into startling focus. The vessel is experienced from within as part of an everyday voyage by the landed Dysart family, as they drink tea on board; and witnessed from below by Francie Fitzpatrick and Roddy Lambert who stand on the jetty and watch as the boat docks “with the sentient ease of a living thing”.
That same mailboat that carried the Dysarts from Holyhead towards home was soon, in December 1921, to transport the delegates who signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty to and from London. An independent Irish state is unthinkable in the world that Somerville and Ross imagine of The Real Charlotte and yet the novel’s dark energies – concerned with histories of gender, property, desire and institutionalisation – carry it forth into our present moment. It remains indispensable reading.
The Irish RM and The Real Charlotte have been reissued by rivverun with new prefaces by Claire Connolly
