Edith used the otherworld Martin to fend her off. Lewis writes: ‘Ethel was not pleased with this intervention from “the impertinent ghost” but furious. Her letters to Edith became intemperate attacks on what she saw as prudishness and gentility. The physical intrusiveness of Ethel’s attempt to possess Edith is evident in the phrase “I have indeed ‘got a claw in’ and hold a bit of you fast”; this prepares us for Virginia Wolf’s reaction to Ethel’s later fixation on her as “like being caught by a giant crab.” (Quoted Louise Collis, Impetuous Heart, p.180; here p.308.)

See also Conclusion: ‘[...]The novels, essays and short stories of Somerville and Ross are much concerned with the inter-relationship of the sexes, and how lasting marriage is achieved. They deal with familiar difficulties in the sexual relationship of men and women, and, as was only to be expected, in describing sexuality they took no bold step to compare with Kate O’Brien, in the next generation of Irish writers. Martin had shied away from what she called ‘the central physical point of life’, and left her partner to deal with the romantic themes of their novels. Often their heroines settle for the unexciting but steady suitor and discard the dangerous but sexually exciting alternative; Sally and Flurry Knox remained their only triumphant mésalliance. By the ’30s and ’40s, when she had reverted to writing of the Ireland of her teens and twenties, Edith had become hopelessly old-fashioned and out of date in the eyes of critics. This was a time when Kate O’Brien was writing of the rise of the new Irish “Top People” as the Anglo-Irish lost their power; she was to write of homosexuality in Land of Spices (1941) and of lesbianism - indirectly in Mary Lavelle (1935) and directly in her Flower of May (1953) and As Music and Splendour (1958).

Although it seems that both Edith and Martin had considered marriage as a possibility, they concealed this as they were trained to conceal all sexual matters, and their natural talents provided them with an alternative route. And although they both made a cult of female friendship that networked this alternative route. this did not preclude close and admiring relationships with men. As they became older their moral sense grew stricter, and the tenets of their religion held them tighter. Unchanged from their parents’ day, the chief sources of moral outrage and disgust remained bastardy and apostasy, or as Martin termed it, perversion. She had recoiled with suspicion and horror from The Picture of Dorian Gray and from the overt sexuality of “The Ballad of the Nun” in the first number of the Yellow Book in 1894. Both writers in their essays on marriage are hard-bitten, seemingly disappointed in romantic love. In her essay “In Sickness and in Health” (1890), written when she was twenty-seven, Martin wrote of peasant marriages in which: “Love [was] the negligible quantity and attachment the rule. It is for us, more singly bent on happiness, to aim at rapture and foreknow disappointment.’ Some bitter experience seems to inform her: ’It is romance that holds the two-edged sword, the sharp ecstasy and the severing scythe stroke, the expectancy and the disillusioning, the trance and the clearer vision.” The essay was written in the second fortnight of April at Glen Barrahane, during a year when she was very much taken with Warham St Leger, whom she failed to persuade to visit her at Ross in the late summer. She had formed an attachment to him by 1888.’ [447]

The pragmatic marriages of the Cork country people that she knew also fascinated Edith. When she was eighty-five, in her essay “For Richer for Poorer” (1933), she wrote: ‘these state alliances, founded though they may be on the commonplace of financial security, have a way of making for happiness that love matches do not invariably achieve, and one begins dispassionately to wonder if the Romantics and the Poets haven’t been wrong all the time, and the stern, business-like parents right.’ The essay closes with a re-set version of a quotation from a Drishane housemaid, taken down in December 1881, when Edith’s relationship with Barry Avonmore had been put on hold. ‘I think I will never be married. I’d love to be an ould maid. A single life is airy.’ It shows an unusually extensive re-write. In the final version, made fifty years after it was first recorded, Edith fictionally describes herself in conversation with a widow who farms alone. ‘I asked her whether she thought a married life or a single one was the happier. The reply was ... “once ye’d got over the disgrace of it, a single life’d be the more airy. But faith!’ she added with a laugh, ‘if ye get marri’d, or if ye stay single, its aiqual which way it is, ye’ll be sorry!”’

The effects of the ‘cage’ imposed on Edith by her class and family proved to be lifelong. She was unable to throw off the bonds and burst out of the cage like the Gore Booth sisters, Maud Gonne or Ethel Smyth. It is Elizabeth Bowen with whom she shared the intense love of home and family, and the impulse to chronicle the Anglo-Irish world in her memoirs. Perhaps because they had both seen that it was all over, Bowen could not bring herself to write Somerville ’s life in the early 196os, when her remaining papers were still coherently organised and accessible. The ’cage’ had naturally imprinted class awareness, the unembarrassed grading of human beings, from Judy O’Grady to the Colonel’s lady, by their accent, clothes and manners. This may have been reprehensible, but the designation of peasant was not meant to be scornfully dismissive or derogatory; Somerville and Ross faithfully preserved and recorded speech, including that of the peasantry, with much less of the subsequent re-writing and ‘improvement’ of those Abbey Theatre play scripts that artfully aimed for ‘PQ’ or ’peasant quality’. Not too impressed by restrictions on familiarity with servants, they had both taken notice of their servants’ and tenants’ world, listened closely and participated in dialogue. The bent of their own humour led them to collect the speech that gave them such pleasure; it was not until they had begun to write descriptive articles for money that they thought of incorporating ’gems’ of recorded speech, which Martin Ross first did in her article “Cheops in Connemara” for The World in 1889, and Edith Somerville in her “Mrs Maloney’s Amateur Theatricals” for Home Chimes in 1885. The idea that they wrote of Ireland de haut en bas is beginning to be discarded, and even in Edith’s lifetime there were Irish writers who acknowledged the quality of the [448] RM. In 1919 Robert Lynd wrote in Ireland a Nation: ‘The Irish RM is no doubt merely the last and best of the books in the Lever-Lover tradition, but it is also a masterpiece which has caught the Irish accent with a genius as sure as Synge’s or Lady Gregory’s [...]’.

They are ranked now among Munster women writers, and some of their books are acknowledged Irish classics. [...]’ (pp.447-49.)