Somerville and Ross (Edith Somerville and Violet Florence Martin, writing under the name Martin Ross) were an Anglo-Irish writing team, perhaps most famous for their series of books that were made into the TV series The Irish R.M. . The television series is based on stories drawn from Some Experiences of an Irish RM, Further Experiences of an Irish RM and In Mr Knox's Country. The various stories concern the life of an Anglo-Irish former British Army officer recently appointed as a resident magistrate (R.M.) in Ireland, which at that stage was still wholly a part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, some years before its partition into the Irish Free State (now the Republic of Ireland) and Northern Ireland.
Somerville and Ross also wrote other work together, including the novel The Real Charlotte (1894), considered their masterpiece. Even after the death of "Ross" in 1915, Somerville continued to write and publish stories under their joint names, claiming that the two were still in contact. The Big House of Inver, a novel of 1925, falls into that category.
The precise nature of their relationship – whether they were romantic and sexual partners as well as literary collaborators and friends – has been the object of speculation by later writers. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, also known by her first married name Charlotte Perkins Stetson, was an American humanist, novelist, writer, lecturer, early sociologist, advocate for social reform, and eugenicist. She was a utopian feminist and served as a role model for future generations of feminists because of her unorthodox concepts and lifestyle. Her works were primarily focused on gender, specifically gendered labor division in society, and the problem of male domination. She has been inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. Her best remembered work today is her semi-autobiographical short story "The Yellow Wallpaper", which she wrote after a severe bout of postpartum psychosis.
Andrew Lang was a Scottish poet, novelist, literary critic, and contributor to the field of anthropology. He is best known as a collector of folk and fairy tales. The Andrew Lang lectures at the University of St Andrews are named after him.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1948.
Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins, better known as Anthony Hope, was a British novelist and playwright. He was a prolific writer, especially of adventure novels but he is remembered predominantly for only two books: The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) and its sequel Rupert of Hentzau (1898).
Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory was an Anglo-Irish dramatist, folklorist and theatre manager. With William Butler Yeats and Edward Martyn, she co-founded the Irish Literary Theatre and the Abbey Theatre, and wrote numerous short works for both companies. Lady Gregory produced a number of books of retellings of stories taken from Irish mythology. Born into a class that identified closely with British rule, she turned against it. Her conversion to cultural nationalism, as evidenced by her writings, was emblematic of many of the political struggles that occurred in Ireland during her lifetime.
Vera Mary Brittain was an English Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse, writer, feminist, socialist and pacifist. Her best-selling 1933 memoir Testament of Youth recounted her experiences during the First World War and the beginning of her journey towards pacifism.
Penelope Mary Fitzgerald was a Booker Prize-winning novelist, poet, essayist and biographer from Lincoln, England. In 2008 The Times listed her among "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945". The Observer in 2012 placed her final novel, The Blue Flower, among "the ten best historical novels". A.S. Byatt called her, "Jane Austen’s nearest heir for precision and invention."
The first Irish prose fiction, in the form of legendary stories, appeared in the Irish language as early as the seventh century, along with chronicles and lives of saints in Irish and Latin. Such fiction was an adaptation and elaboration of earlier oral material and was the work of a learned class who had acquired literacy with the coming of Latin Christianity. A number of these stories were still available in manuscripts of the late medieval period and even as late as the nineteenth century, though poetry was by that time the main literary vehicle of the Irish language.
Frank Frankfort Moore (1855–1931) was an Irish journalist, novelist, dramatist, and poet. He was a Belfast Protestant and a unionist, but his historical fiction during the years of Home Rule agitation did not shy from themes of Irish-Catholic dispossession.
Violet Florence Martin was an Irish author who co-wrote a series of novels with cousin Edith Somerville under the pen name of Martin Ross in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The Irish R.M. is a 1983 television comedy-drama series based on a trilogy of books by the Anglo-Irish novelists Somerville and Ross. It is set in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century west of Ireland.
Percy Hetherington Fitzgerald was an Anglo-Irish author and critic, painter and sculptor.
Edith Anna Œnone Somerville was an Irish novelist who habitually signed herself as "E. Œ. Somerville". She wrote in collaboration with her cousin "Martin Ross" under the pseudonym "Somerville and Ross". Together they published a series of fourteen stories and novels, the most popular of which were The Real Charlotte, published in 1894, and Some Experiences of an Irish R. M., published in 1899.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Knox is a Scottish surname that originates from the Scottish Gaelic "cnoc", meaning a hillock or a hump or the Old English "cnocc", meaning a round-topped hill.
Constance Winifred Savery was a British writer of fifty novels and children's books, as well as many short stories and articles. She was selected for the initial issue of the long-running series entitled The Junior Book of Authors (1951–2008) and for the first, 1971, volume of Anne Commire's Something About the Author, which reached volume 320 in 2018. Savery's World War II novel, Enemy Brothers, received praise and remains in print. In 1980, at age eighty-two, she completed a Charlotte Brontë two-chapter fragment, which was published as "Emma by Charlotte Brontë and Another Lady". The book was translated into Dutch, Spanish, and Russian.
The Conmaicne Cúile or Conmaicne Cuile Tolad were an early people of Ireland. Their tuath comprised, at minimum, most of the barony of Kilmaine, in County Mayo.
The Real Charlotte is a novel by the Anglo-Irish writing partnership Somerville and Ross, composed of Edith Somerville (1858–1949) and Violet Florence Martin (1862–1915).
Julian Lane Moynahan was an American academic, librarian, literary critic, poet, and novelist. Much of Moynahan's academic work was focussed on D. H. Lawrence and Vladimir Nabokov. He was active as a book reviewer for leading publications on both sides of the Atlantic and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1983.