SOURCE: Cronin, Anthony. “Edith Somerville and Martin Ross: Women Fighting Back.” In Heritage Now: Irish Literature in the English Language, pp. 75-86. Kerry, Ireland: Brandon Book Publishers, 1982.

In the below essay, Cronin places the work of Somerville and Ross within its historical context.

I

Edith Somerville first saw her cousin, Violet Martin, on 17th January, 1886. “It was”, she wrote in after-life, “as it happens, in church that I saw her first; in our own church, in Castle Townshend … It is trite, not to say stupid, to expatiate upon that January Sunday when I first met her; yet it has proved the hinge of my life, the place where my fate, and hers, turned over, and new and unforeseen things happened to both of us.”

The date is important. January 1886 was the month in which Gladstone announced his conversion to Home Rule. Loyalists of all shades of opinion had...