On This Day: Somerville and Ross

On this day in 1862, Violet Florence Martin was born in Connemara, the youngest of 16 children to the landed Martin family in Ross. She was to become with Edith Somerville the author of many novels about Anglo Irish life, under the names Somerville and Ross. Produced and presented by Brian Byrne.

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Violet met up with a second cousin, Edith Somerville in 1886, and they subsequently became lifelong companions.

Three years later they published their first book, written jointly, titled An Irish Cousin. Violet assumed a pseudonym, Martin Ross, combining her surname and the name of the family home. The two women thereafter wrote under the combined authorship of Somerville and Ross.

Over the next 25 years they published a total of 13 novels, all stories based in the Anglo-Irish life of the period. 

Violet was also an active supporter of the suffragette movement, and was vice president of the Munster Women's Franchise League. She was also a contemporary of WB Yeats and Lady Gregory and friendly with both, though she disagreed on what she felt was a romantic representation by them of Irish peasantry. 


Their last published work was In Mr Knox's Country in 1915, the year she died. She was buried in Castletownshend, where she and Edith had first met. Edith herself lived until the age of 91, passing away in 1949. She is buried alongside Violet.

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