ABSTRACT
Somerville and Ross were a lesbian Irish writing couple, in some respects rather like the Michael FIELDS who were also blood-related. Somerville (1858-1949) was born Edith Anna Oenone Somerville in Corfu. She was brought up in her family’s eighteenthcentury house in West Cork. This background served as material for her later writing. Somerville trained as an illustrator, studying art in London and Paris. For a while she adopted the pseudonym Guilles Herring. She was an accomplished huntswoman who in 1903 served as the first female master of foxhounds, and was master of the west Carberry pack between 1912 and 1919. She was also actively involved in the suffrage movement and was president of the Munster Women’s Franchise League. After the First World War she exhibited her work as an artist and in 1926 she made a radio appearance reading her own poetry. In her later life she was a close companion of the lesbian composer Ethel SMYTH. Ross (1862-1915) was born Violet Florence Martin and educated in Dublin. She assumed the pseudonym Martin Ross. Somerville met Ross in 1886 and they became life-long companions. Although they did not describe their relationship as lesbian they made it clear that they thought of themselves as married. Ross and Somerville were second cousins. They set up house together in Drishane, County Cork, and collaborated on a series of humorous novels about the rural Irish gentry. Their work includes An Irish Cousin (1889), Naboth’s Vineyard (1891), In the Vine Country (1893), Through Connemara in a Governess Cart (1893), Beggars on Horseback (1895), The Silver Fox (1897), Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. (1899), which was turned into a successful TV series in 1983-4, and their most famous novel, The Real Charlotte (1894), which features two cousins. They also wrote A Patrick’s Day Hunt (1902), All on the Irish Shore (1903), Further Experiences of an Irish R.M. (1908), and Dan Russell the Fox (1911). Following Ross’s death Somerville continued to write under their joint name. Their joint legacy includes thousands of letters and 116 volumes of diaries. After Ross’s death Somerville published In Mr Knox’s Country (1915), Mount Music (1919), The Big House at Inver (1925), The Sweet Cry of Hounds (1936), and Sarah’s Youth (1938). In 1981 Somerville and Ross’s life was dramatized for BBC radio by Maureen DUFFY in Only Goodnight. A further version of their lives, also by Maureen Duffy, was broadcast by BBC radio in 1986 under the title On the Hunt for Somerville and Ross.
