SOURCE: Hall, Wayne E. “Somerville and Ross.” In Shadowy Heroes: Irish Literature of the 1890s, pp. 66-74. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1980.

In the following essay, Hall presents an overview of the social, political, and economic processes that formed the background for Somerville and Ross's writing.

Somerville and Ross frequently placed their own experiences against a broad background of major social processes. In “The Martins of Ross,” an essay on her family written only a few years before her death in 1915, Violet Martin described her father's funeral in 1872 as the final tableau in a tragic drama: “With the death of my father the curtain fell for ever on the old life at Ross, the stage darkened, and the keening of the tenants as they followed his coffin was the last music of the piece.”¹ James Martin's death became for her the nation's loss as well as her own, yet...