TIMES PAST: Edith Somerville - an author, artist and a musician, and so much more besides | Southern Star

TWO graves, lying side by side in St Barrahane’s churchyard, Castletownshend, pay tribute to the lives of Edith Somerville, and her writing collaborator Violet Martin (Ross). Born in Cyprus in 1858, Edith was brought up locally in Drishane House. Her writing partnership with Ross, her second cousin whom she met in her late 20s, led to the publication of journals of their trips around Ireland, Europe and USA, and novels, the most famous being The Real Charlotte (1894) and the humorous Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. (1899), adapted for TV in the 1980s.

Edith’s epitaph acknowledges her literary achievements: the honorary Doctorate she was awarded in 1932 by Trinity College Dublin. A plaque inside the church, placed there by ‘her friends and admirers in America’, refers to her as an ‘author, artist and musician’. Having studied art in Düsseldorf, Paris and London, she painted and sold oil landscapes, many depicting local scenes such as Drombeg Stone Circle. As a musician, for 70 years she played the organ in St Barrahane’s.

However, the inscriptions neglect to mention other facets of her life. Here are six:

1. Social historian

In West Cork, life was changing fast. The Anglo-Irish landed gentry had once ruled Ireland from their big houses but were losing ground to a new middle class of merchants and professional men. Edith and Violet recorded this happening and placed people in their precise social positions. ‘Catholic middle-class moving up’, ‘Gentlemen run wild’. They captured the voices, manners and thoughts of the native Irish before Independence. ‘They’re making fun of us!’, commented one reader.

Edith’s research involved not just eavesdropping but speaking to those ‘below stairs’. She ‘became familiar with poverty and dirt’, and the places frequented by servants: ‘laundries, kitchens, boot cupboards, ashpits’ (Gifford Lewis, Somerville and Ross, 1985).

2. Activist

As she was growing up, Edith’s parents treated her as ‘more than equal’ to her six brothers. She became strong-willed and independent-minded, refusing to accept the expectations placed on women at that time. On 30 November 1880 she wrote in her diary: ‘I will paint. I will also work’. Writing became ‘a full time, though much interrupted, occupation’. She began championing women’s rights and joined the Suffragist movement. In 1910 she became President of the Munster Women’s Franchise League, establishing branches in Waterford and Skibbereen, and organising 16 meetings during her first year. Improving women’s rights involved extending schooling for girls. Only a practical education, she believed ‘shall arouse women’s constructive sense… [and] make them critical’.

3. Nationalist

The Protestant land-owning Somerville family had Unionist sympathies, many of the men having served in the British Army. Edith broke with Unionism, and became a Home Ruler and Nationalist. At parties she played Irish tunes and sang Nationalist songs. She ‘very nearly’ joined Sinn Fein, accepted the IRA as a legitimate army, and blamed the British government and the Black and Tans for the state of affairs in Ireland.

Signing herself ‘An Irishwoman’, she wrote a letter to The Times asking for clemency for the rebel leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising. After the Croke Park massacre, 1920, she informed her sister Hildegarde that she preferred Dàil Éireann to what she called ‘doldromising Westminster’, and had not ‘one spark of loyalty to England left’.

4. Sportswoman

Horses and hunting were an important element in her life. Back in 1903 Edith Somerville, aged 44, took over from her brother Aylmer as Master of Fox Hounds in the barony of West Carbery, ‘that fair and far-away district… the ultimate corner of the ultimate speck of Europe’. At this period, women were involved in hunting but not at this level: it made her the first female MFH in Ireland. She occupied the position until 1908.

5. Automatic Writer

Edith always held an interest in ghosts, who she refers to as ‘my friends. When Violet died prematurely in 1915, she employed medium Jem Barlow to keep in touch with her friend. Jem got Violet’s spirit to manipulate her hand in a process known since Victorian times as ‘Automatic Writing’ – practised regularly by W.B. Yeats and his wife. The first spiritual communication from Violet read: ‘You and I have not finished our work. Dear, we shall, be comforted. V.M.’ For the rest of her life, Edith continued to consult Violet on almost a daily basis, recording her words with her dark green fountain pen in special notebooks, and continuing to publish under their joint names ‘Somerville and Ross’.

6. Farmer

Edith was a progressive farmer and in 1905 built a creamery on the boundary of the Drishane estate. Around this time, she introduced the first herd of Holstein Friesian cattle into Ireland – 25 in all. They proceeded to breed, and today they’re everywhere. Neighbouring farmers encouraged her to join the Farmers’ Union in 1919. Two years later, she wrote an ‘expert article’ on Friesian cattle for a Sinn Féin Agricultural Improvement Committee. How appropriate that in Harry Clarke’s nativity window in St Barrahane’s Church, Castletownshend, peeking out behind the Three Wise Men, is the violet head of a Friesian cow.

Edith Somerville died in 1949, aged 91. She had spurned marriage – the all-too-common solution for the daughter of an impoverished gentleman – and supported herself through her writing, giving lectures and selling Irish horses to America. She managed her estate alone, proving what the ‘new woman’ could achieve without the aid of a man.