Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Edith Somerville
-
Standard Name: Somerville, Edith
Birth Name: Edith Anne Œnone Somerville
Pseudonym: Geilles Herring
Pseudonym: Viva Graham
Pseudonym: E. Œ. Somerville
Pseudonym: Somerville and Ross
ES
, who published from 1885, is known from the Somerville and Ross partnership which produced at least one important novel and a collection of classic comic stories (set in the west of Ireland and centred on fox-hunting), as well as other endearing Irish sketches and travel writings. She continued to write in these genres, mostly story and memoir, after Ross's death (which she saw as interrupting but not ending their collaboration). The later works (the last appeared in 1949) are suffused with nostalgia, and very largely dominated by the need to make money, to keep going an estate which was no longer financially viable. The massive archive of ES
's diary and letters is still almost unexamined.
"Edith Somerville" by Hulton Archive/Stringer,1916-01-01.Retrieved from https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/irish-novelist-edith-somerville-with-her-cousin-violet-news-photo/3062689.This image is licensed under the GETTY IMAGES CONTENT LICENCE AGREEMENT.
Through these social engagements, KCT
came into contact with several significant figures of the day. At a dinner given by Colonel George Harvey
, for instance, she probably met Mr
and Mrs Winston Churchill
...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Bowen
The authors whom EB
wrote of for the British Council in English Novelists are (as the commission required) canonical and mostly male. She was deeply influenced by Virginia Woolf
, and wrote after Woolf's death...
Intertextuality and Influence
Molly Keane
The stories, told through the eyes of an Englishman dazzled by Ireland, concern a family in a big-house: an aristocratic father, domineering and hiding his love; a brother and sister whose lives are wrapped...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Russell Mitford
Our Village is often said to have inaugurated its genre of small-scale, local-colour sketch writing, but (apart from Washington Irving
's Geoffrey Crayon's Sketch Book, 1819) it owes an obvious debt to the work...
Intertextuality and Influence
Kate O'Brien
Lorna Reynolds notes a parallel between the KOB
of this novel, on the one hand, and Somerville
and Ross
, on the other. Like her very different predecessors in the west-of-Ireland novel, O'Brien describes landscape...
Intertextuality and Influence
Martin Ross
Before ever meeting her cousin Edith Somerville
, Violet Ross
had written articles (perhaps in emulation of her eldest brother
) and probably poetry, but none of this survives.
Collis, Maurice. Somerville and Ross: A Biography. Faber and Faber, 1968.
24
Material Conditions of Writing
Martin Ross
MR
and Edith Somerville
, staying at Etaples in France, began work on the stories which became Some Experiences of an Irish R. M.
Collis, Maurice. Somerville and Ross: A Biography. Faber and Faber, 1968.
123
names
Martin Ross
Somerville and Ross was a joint pseudonym often used to refer to the writings of MR
and her second cousin Edith Somerville
.
Occupation
Constance Smedley
Since the Langham Place Group
had provided a social space for women in 1860, several organizations had already challenged the flourishing institution of men's clubs. The Lyceum Club
came on the scene at a time...
Author summary
Martin Ross
It is widely suspected that MR
may have been the dominant partner, the chief creative spirit, in the partnership of Somerville
and Ross which occupied the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (though the opposite...
Publishing
Martin Ross
In MR
's first collaboration with her cousin Edith Somerville
(an article on palmistry published in the Graphic) the writing was by Ross, the illustrations by Somerville.
Collis, Maurice. Somerville and Ross: A Biography. Faber and Faber, 1968.