About the Author
The partnership of Somerville and Ross was regarded as a “literary miracle.” While they were cousins who shared a mutual great-grandfather, they did not meet until they were in their twenties. Edith Oenone Somerville (1858-1949) was from Castletownshend, County Cork; Violet Martin (1862-1915) was from much further north in Connemara, County Galway, where she managed the sixteenth-century family estate of Ross, which gave her the nom de plume by which she is better known. Their work was so intimately embedded in their actual lives, backgrounds, and surroundings that many of the almost Dickensian caricatures of Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. were based on their friends.
