ABSTRACT
Following in the tradition of Maria Edgeworth, a close friend of their great-grandmother, the two were particularly interested in language and dialect, first working together on The Buddh Dictionary, a collection of phrases used by Somerville's family, and throughout their lives collecting instances of the Irish use of English. Yeats praised the accuracy of the reported Irish speech in their work. These details of Irish life were the most effective aspect of their first novels, An Irish Cousin (1889) and Naboth's Vineyard(1891), both of which are burdened with Gothic and melodramatic plot devices. The Real Charlotte (1894) was their most effective novel and was honored as a World Classic by Oxford University Press in 1948. Set against the background of Anglo-Irish society as portrayed through the decaying Dysart family, it focuses particularly on two women, Francie, an uneducated but beautiful lower-class girl, and Charlotte, an unattractive, driven middle-class woman who is successful in her business dealings but fails in her personal relations. The novel, like much of their work, is a study of frustrated desire and has been compared favorably with Austen's novels, George Eliot's Middlemarch, and Balzac's Cousine Bette. Their subsequent novel, The Silver Fox (1898), was less successful, perhaps because it deals so intensely with Irish mysticism.
