Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.

Résumé du livre

Edith Somerville (1858-1949) Violet Martin (1862-1915) It was, as it happens, in church that I saw her first, in our own church, in Castle Townshend. That was on Sunday, January 17, 1889... it has proved the hinge of my life, the place where my fate, and hers, turned over, and new and unforeseen things began to happen to us. This is how Edith Somerville, in her nostalgic work, Irish Memories (1917), records the profound significance of her first meeting with her cousin, Violet Martin. It was a meeting which was to result in a deep and enduring friendship and was eventually to produce one of the most celebrated of modern literary partnerships. Violet Martin adopted the pseudonym 'Martin Ross', coupling her surname with the name of the family seat in the West of Ireland, and the two women achieved international fame as 'Somerville and Ross' with a series of fine novels and particularly as authors of the 'Irish R.M.' stories, three volumes of which appeared between 1899 and 1915. The two were second cousins, sharing a celebrated great-grandfather, Charles Kendal Bushe (1767-1843), whose biography Edith was to write in later life. The Somervilles and the Martins were long-established, Protestant, Anglo-Irish, Ascendancy families, the former based in the far south-west of Ireland at Castle Townshend and the latter in the west, in Co. Galway.