Finding Ireland: A Poet's Explorations of Irish Literature and Culture

The Uneasy World of Somerville and Ross

The Uneasy World of Somerville and Ross Let us take Carbery and grind its bones to make our bread,” Violet Martin wrote in a letter to Edith Oenone Somerville in 1889, “and we will serve it up to the spectator so that its mother wouldn’t know it.”Violet (1862–1915) was then twenty-six years old, and Edith (1858–1949) thirtyone ; the two second cousins had recently finished collaborating on their first novel, An Irish Cousin, which would be published in London later that year. Violet, who took the nom de plume of Martin Ross, was writing from her family’s ancestral home, Ross House, near Oughterard in County Galway. The bones she proposed to grind were those of “that fair and far-away district , the Barony of West Carbery, County Cork,” as Edith later called the place in her Irish Memories, “the ultimate corner of the ultimate speck of Europe—Ireland.” Martin’s humorous, offthe -cuff characterization is powerfully suggestive of the nature and purpose of their art. In Somerville and Ross’s world, social hierarchies are strictly observed. “That they were snobs—in one sense of that word,” observes Conor Cruise O’Brien almost casually, followed naturally 69 “ Tillinghast pt 2 8/20/08 3:25 PM Page 69 from the fact that they belonged to the Irish landed gentry. They had to look down on other people in order to see them. Or so they sincerely felt. And they wanted to see them clearly, to place them socially: “Catholic middle-class moving up”; “Protestant lower-middle class, stuck”; “Gentleman run wild, with touch of brogue.” They wrote on these matters with an almost pedantic care for accuracy, within social conventions which they thoroughly understood and thoroughly approved. Though they were worlds better off than the mass of the Irish peasantry at the end of the nineteenth century, the AngloIrish landed gentry that had at one time ruled the island from their “big houses” was fast losing ground to a newly emergent and resourceful middle class of merchants, professional men, land agents, and the like, who were buying up properties the Anglo-Irish were selling in the wake of recent land agitation.The famines of the 1840s, in which one-quarter of the population either died or was forced to emigrate, also ruined the landlords. As Gifford Lewis makes clear in the introduction to her edition of the Somerville and Ross letters, the Anglo-Irish, including the Martins and the Somervilles, had now, like the rest of the world, to earn their own living. And they did so resourcefully and with élan. Elizabeth Bowen had this to say on the subject in 1940: It is, I think, to the credit of big house people that they concealed their struggles with such nonchalance and for so long continued to throw about what did not really amount to much weight. It is to their credit that, with grass almost up their doors and hardly a sixpence to turn over, they continued to be resented by the rest of Ireland as being the heartless rich. Sir Egerton Coghill and Hildegarde, Lady Coghill, Edith’s brother-in-law and sister, went into the photography business The UneasyWorld of Somerville and Ross Tillinghast pt 2 8/20/08 3:25 PM Page 70 and sold their pictures of the rugged West Cork shoreline to the tourist trade. Hildegarde managed a dairy herd and a violet farm from which she shipped flowers all over the British Isles.Violet Martin’s mother sold her eggs and greengage plums in the market at Oughterard. In her later years we find Edith Somerville buying Irish horses and traveling to America to sell them while at the same time conducting lecture tours. The sons of these families went into the army, the navy, and the church. Robert Martin, Violet’s brother, who should by right have become the master of the Ross estate, which in the seventeenth century had amounted to some 200,000 acres, was a political journalist and writer of popular songs in London. Some of the female cousins became doctors or journalists, or wrote children ’s books. The most common solution to financial insecurity for the daughters of impoverished gentry families, though, was marriage . Gifford Lewis, whose Somerville and Ross:The World of the Irish R.M. (1985) I draw on heavily here, puts it this way: “Many an English officer took...