Edith Somerville (1858-1949)
part 2 Violet Martin (1862-1915)

The novel was well received by most of the journals and, had circumstances been different, the cousins might have gone on to the composition of further novels of major significance. As it was, however, they were diverted into the writing of highly successful short stories. The huge success of their Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. in 1899 led to a demand for more stories of the same kind. Their literary agent, J. B. Pinker, constantly pressed them to turn out more of the comic stories which had made them a household name everywhere. They published two further sets of these, Further Experiences of an Irish R.M. in 1908 and In Mr Knox's Country in 1915, the year of Violet Martin's death. She died, of an inoperable brain tumour, in a Cork nursing-home and Edith, shattered by grief, believed she would never write again now that her beloved partner had left her. Gradually, however, she came to believe that she could communicate with Martin's spirit through spiritualistic séances and that Martin wished her to go on writing. She began, appropriately enough, by publishing in 1917 a reminiscential work, Irish Memories as a loving tribute to her dead cousin. She was to go on to write five further novels and various other works in the course of the next thirty years. She always insisted that the renowned joint pseudonym of 'Somerville and Ross' should appear on all her work. She believed that the spirit of her dead partner was actively assisting her and, in any case, two of the late novels, Mount Music (1919) and The Big House of Inver (1925) had originally been planned by the partners together but had been put aside as they felt the works were attempting to deal with touchy subjects such as inter-marriage between Catholic and Protestant at 'Big-House' level.

Edith lived to a great age and, having been born into the heyday of Queen Victoria, survived into the new Ireland of Eamonn de Valera and his successors. The partners' work gradually won generous recognition from their fellow-writers and the academic world. Edith was awarded the degree of Doctor of Letters by Trinity College Dublin in 1932. Later in the same year, W.B. Yeats invited her to become a member of the Irish Academy of Letters and, nine years later, the Academy bestowed on her the Gregory Gold Medal, its most important literary award. She lived on at the family residence, Drimshane House, until 1946 and then moved, with her younger sister Hildegarde, to a house in the main street of Castle Townshend which bore the euphoric title of 'Tally-Ho', the name which the cousins had bestowed on the residence of Charlotte Mullen all those years before, in The Real Charlotte. It was at 'Tally-Ho' that Edith died in 1949 at the great age of ninety-one.

back to part 1.

From the Appletree Press title: The Anglo-Irish Novel volume 1.
Also from Appletree: Famous Irish Writers.