SOURCE: Orel, Harold. “Some Elements of Truth in the Short Stories of Somerville and Ross: An Appreciation.” English Literature in Transition 1880-1920 30, no. 1 (1987): 17-25.

In the below essay, Orel challenges and thereby revises the notion that Somerville and Ross, in their short fiction, represented the viewpoint of the Ascendancy class to which they themselves belonged.

The thirty-four stories of Somerville and Ross have been reprinted in one volume under an omnibus title, The Irish R. M. and his Experiences (1928). For three generations the authors have been censured for adopting wholeheartedly and uncritically the prejudices of the Ascendancy class (to which, indeed, Somerville and Ross belonged), but the fact that their narratives bubbled over with good cheer, and had little or nothing bad to say about the English who were grinding down the Irish remorselessly in everybody else's fictions, does not change the bases of their continuing appeal.

The...