Edith Somerville

02 May 1858 - 08 October 1949

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.

Full profile

Connections

Connections Sort descending	Author name	Excerpt
Cultural formation	Martin Ross	Violet belonged to the wealthy Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendancy. Cronin, John. Somerville and Ross. Bucknell University Press, 1972. 15 Her family, of Norman origin, had been one of the largest landowners in the west of Ireland during the eighteenth century, and still held about six...
Family and Intimate relationships	Ethel Smyth	ES met Edith Somerville , with whom she conducted an emotionally-charged correspondence for several years. Collis, Louise. Impetuous Heart: The Story of Ethel Smyth. William Kimber, 1984. 152, 156-8, 161
Family and Intimate relationships	Martin Ross	Violet Martin (later MR ) met her second cousin Edith Somerville for the first time, while staying in the village of Castletownshend, in Cork. Collis, Maurice. Somerville and Ross: A Biography. Faber and Faber, 1968. 39, 25-8 Cronin, John. Somerville and Ross. Bucknell University Press, 1972. 14
Friends, Associates	Augusta Gregory	One of AG 's friends at this time was Katherine Martin of Ross, whose elder sister, Violet Martin (known as Martin Ross) , later became part of a famous writing duo with her cousin Edith Somerville
Friends, Associates	Katherine Cecil Thurston	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. 38

Timeline

1911

The Munster Women's Franchise League was founded in Cork by writers Edith Somerville and Violet Martin , who published together as Somerville and Ross.