Irish Authoresses
LADIES are rarely known in polite society by their surnames except when they appear in the dock. But more than a generation ago the combined name of Somerville and Ross was so widespread that it might have been mistaken for that of a highly respectable firm by unlucky persons who had never heard of Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.. When Martin Ross died in 1915 at the age of fifty-three, her friend, Edith S9Merville, was profoundly grieved and, for more than thirty years, the memory of an ideal literary partnership sustained and inspired her. So she retained on the title page of all her own books the pen-name of her cousin, Violet Martin. Miss Geraldine Cummins met both these remarkable writers at a suffragette meeting some months before the First World War, but her friendship with Edith Somerville did not begin until fourteen years later. This accounts, no doubt, for the fact that she devotes most of her book to the later years of the senior collaborator. Miss Cummins is conscientious and somewhat anxious in her tone, but she is unsystematic and uncritical in her approach. However, she gives us a very clear portrait of an indomitable old lady who had the fine characteristics of the Victorian past. Edith Somerville spent all her life in her native place, the remote picturesque district of West Carbery in Co. Cork. She lived to the great age of ninety- one and, despite inevitable ills, she maintained her vigour of mind.
She continued to write reminiscences of hunting days, essays, sketches and some novels. She combined this activity with the duties and cares of the family estate, for she farmed, exported horses, played the church organ every Sunday and performed many works of charity. She held stern views on morality, and, being of a reserved nature, refused to discuss these views even in private. In the daring days of youth " Martin Ross " and she had smoked, but she had long since abandoned the noxious habit and disapproved of it in others. Miss Cummins confesses that, when she was a guest at Drishane House, she had to creep out guiltily to the shrubbery in order to enjoy a cigarette.
Some may be disappointed in this biography ; they will search in vain for the source of all that irrepressible humour which gallops and tumbles innocently throughout so many books. But Miss Cummins cannot be wholly blamed, for the secret, no doubt, was that of youth itself and its gay confidences. We may suspect that those two young ladies of quality and genius, Edith Somerville and her Co. Galway cousin, Violet Martin, looked at man, feared the monster and then laughed at him. The joke was too good to keep to themselves, and so they shared it with a delighted public. The physical exhilaration of the hunting-field, the thrills and dangers, helped to keep the pair in the best of spirits. But Edith Somerville and " Martin Ross " wrote five books, including that grim and powerful novel, The Real Charlotte, before they discovered their inimitable gift.
Oblivious of the Celtic Twilight movement led by W. B. Yeats in the 'nineties, they returned to the rollicking Anglo-Irish humour of Lover and Lever, refined and concentrated it in short stories. In daring -the outworn stage-Irish tradition, by matching their own laughter against it, they achieved something unique, and part of their success was due to their care in the use if idiom. In form and style they learned a good deal, perhaps, from the short stories of Kipling. But later, in a vigorous essay, they criticised the master's use of a bogus " brogue " when he dealt with Irish characters. Indeed Edith Somerville, in one of her later letters, was angered when a well- meaning English proof-reader insisted on changing " sure," when- ever he met it, into " shure." The adventures of Major Yeates, the Resident Magistrate, Mrs Flurry Knox, Slipper, the McRorys, the Flynns, Dr. Jerome Hickey and all the rest of those diverting characters proved irresistible even to those who had no interest in blood sports. Those adventures were continued in successive volumes ; but the authors took a risk in prolonging their joke.
AUSTIN CLARKE.
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