This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Monika Wittmann and Otto Rauchbauer. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Born: 2 May 1858, Greece
Died: 8 October 1949
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: NA
Somerville, Edith Anna Œnone (1858–1949), and Martin, Violet Florence (‘Martin Ross’) (1862–1915), writers, were, through their mothers, descended from Charles Kendal Bushe, lord chief justice of Ireland. Owing to their literary collaboration for almost thirty years, their biographies may be conveniently evaluated together.
On 21 December 1915 Violet Martin, who had been in poor health after a hunting accident in 1898, died from a brain tumour in Cork. She was buried in Castletownshend, which had become her second home after her mother’s death in 1906.
Edith Œ. Somerville was born 2 May 1858 in Corfu, eldest child of Col. Thomas Henry Somerville (1824–98) and his wife Adelaide Eliza (née Coghill) (1831–95). The family, originally of Anglo-Norman descent, having come to Ireland in the eighteenth century, soon returned to their family home, Drishane, Castletownshend, Co. Cork. Somerville spent a term at Alexandra College, Dublin (1875); in this year she became organist in the parish church of St Barrahane’s, Castletownshend, a post that she filled till 1945. In 1876 she took drawing lessons at the South Kensington School of Art, later following her cousin E. Coghill to Düsseldorf, where she took lessons with G. Nicolet and Carl Sohn. In 1887 she moved to various Paris studios, working under Colarossi and Délécluse. Her output in the visual arts consisted of drawings, often in a comic vein, and oil paintings (landscape and portrait). In the second half of the 1880s she was active as a professional illustrator for the Lady’s Pictorial and the Graphic, later illustrating some of her own prose and that written in collaboration. She had exhibitions at the Goupil Gallery in London (1920), Walker’s Gallery, London (1923, 1927), and the Ackermann Galleries, New York (1929).
One side of her life shows a deep attachment to her family home in west Cork and a wide network of relations. After the death of her parents she was in charge of the family home and supervised the farm till 1945; four of her brothers were officers in the British army or navy. From 1903 to 1919 she was master of foxhounds; her passion for horse-riding and hunting, which she shared with her writing partner, stood her in good stead in her literary output. From the first decade of the twentieth century onwards she involved herself in the suffrage movement, becoming president of the Munster Women’s Franchise League in 1913 (Martin became vice-president). She became interested in the Arts and Crafts movement and commissioned from Harry Clarke a series of stained-glass windows in St Barrahane’s, Castletownshend. Her interest in spiritualism and automatic writing was particularly strong after the death of her writing partner in 1915. Though rooted in her local community, she also developed more cosmopolitan interests and travelled widely; this is reflected in her travel journals (Through Connemara in a governess cart (1892); In the vine country (1893); Beggars on horseback (1895); The States through Irish eyes (New York, 1930; London, 1931); and others). She corresponded with G. B. Shaw, Rudyard Kipling, G. W. Russell, Maurice Baring, Douglas Hyde, Stephen Gwynn, and Sir Horace Plunkett, some of whom she also knew personally. Ethel Smyth (1858–1944), the English composer, became a close friend from 1919 on. She was awarded an honorary D.Litt. by TCD in 1932 and was a founding member of the Irish Academy of Letters.
Somerville had a deep understanding and appreciation of Irish rural people, their folklore and language, and at times sympathised with the cause of nationalists such as Patrick Pearse. On the other hand, she shared with other members of her class a basically ambivalent attitude towards the catholic Irish. Both her painting and writing helped her and her writing partner to gain financial independence and pursue their own interests. Her unique partnership with Martin between 1886 and 1915 was based on a consonance of ideas and on the ability to develop plots and details through conversations. Of the two, Martin was probably more intellectually inclined and had a wider frame of literary reference. Somerville – in part because of her spiritualist beliefs – insisted on retaining the ‘Somerville and Ross’ label in her books even after the death of her cousin. As a writer she regarded herself in the tradition of Maria Edgeworth and Sir Walter Scott. Her reading of English and Irish literature was more comprehensive than has been thought. However, in her later life she was less inclined to appreciate modernism in whichever field she encountered it. She showed a certain interest in the work of the Irish literary renaissance, but kept a basic aloofness. She was one of the great letter-writers before the advent of modern means of communication.
A group of works, which may be labelled autobiographical and historical, include Irish memories (1917), Wheel-tracks (1923), An incorruptible Irishman (1932), and Records of the Somerville family (1940). After the earliest volume, which is also a tribute to Somerville’s dead writing partner, one notices a progression to more representative chronicle material; as has been noted, her method of presentation is mosaic rather than coherent. There is a desire on the part of the author to record her deep Irish roots, a vanishing order, and sometimes the virtues of Irish landlords.
The fictional work of Somerville and Ross (altogether ten novels) is uneven in quality. Their best work, The real Charlotte (1894), which was eventually included in the World’s Classics series (1948) and is now rightly regarded as one of the great English-language novels of the Victorian period, is a powerful psychological character study of a young girl, Francie Fitzpatrick, and Charlotte Mullen, a land agent’s aspiring daughter, whose attempts at manipulating people end tragically. The three volumes of the RM stories (Some experiences of an Irish RM (1899); Further experiences of an Irish RM (1908); In Mr Knox’s country (1915)) became a great success in England. With the memorable, yet stylised characters of Flurry Knox and Major Yeates, these are pure comedy, although occasionally a few stories also show the darker sides of life; some of them are technically highly accomplished. Three later novels, Mount Music (1919), An enthusiast (1921), and The Big House of Inver (1925), are the author’s response to the troubled period of Irish history in the twentieth century. Mount Music is a fictional representation of the protestant–catholic antagonism in terms of two big houses and an aspiring doctor’s family. The second novel is centred on a young agricultural reformer, who is killed during the Anglo–Irish war, trapped, as it were, between the two sides. The third shares with Yeats’s Purgatory the subject of the deterioration of a Big House family through intermarriage with the native Irish; its main achievement is again a convincing female character portrait (Shibby Pindy).
Somerville moved to Tally Ho, a house in Castletownshend, in 1947; here she died 8 October 1949 and was buried in the churchyard of St Barrahane’s next to her writing partner. In 1997 a memorial was set up in a room in Drishane which she had used as a studio from 1892 to 1946.
Manuscript collections are in QUB; TCD; NLI; the Sir Toby Coghill family archive, Scotland; the Drishane archive, Drishane, Co. Cork; the Berg collection, New York Public Library; and the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Portraits of Somerville include Charlotte Bushe’s pastel/ crayon of her aged about five (Drishane), a copy of a daguerreotype done in Dublin in the 1860s; and John Crealock’s portrait, c.1930 (Drishane). Somerville’s portraits of Martin are dated 1886 (National Portrait Gallery, London); 1890 (pastel of Martin asleep in a wood in Ross; Drishane archive, item R.43.a); 1908 (Drishane); and Dec. 1915 (crayon/ drawing of the dying Martin; location of original unknown; reproduced by Gifford Lewis (1985), p. 185).