A dark tale of a world “weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable.” An unscrupulous woman works the ruin of a sweet-natured, ill-trained girl. Scene: Irish country neighbourhood. Characters, land agents, farmers, great ladies, drawn with impartial and relentless truth. Pronounced by many critics to be worthy of Balzac.
⸺ THE SILVER FOX. Pp. 195. (Longmans). 3s. 6d. [1898]. (Lawrence and Bullen).
The chief interest of this story lies in some sporting scenes in the West of Ireland. The peasantry are seen from an uncomprehending standpoint, and the chief figures are people of fashion, of no particular nationality. “Broadly speaking, the novel may be said to exhibit in a dramatic form the extraordinary hold which superstition still possesses on the minds of the Irish peasantry.”—(Spectator).
⸺ SOME EXPERIENCES OF AN IRISH R.M. Pp. iv. + 310. Thirty-second thousand. (Longmans). 3s. 6d. Thirty-one illustr. (pen and ink sketches) by E. Œ. Somerville. 1899.
Racy, humorous sketches of hunting and other episodes in the south and west. The Author’s most successful work originally appeared in The Badminton Magazine.
⸺ ALL ON THE IRISH SHORE. Pp. iv. + 274. Eighteenth thousand. (Longmans). 3s. 6d. Ten illustr. by E. Œ. Somerville. 1903.
Sketches of fox-hunting, horse-dealing, racing, trials for assault between neighbours, petty boycotting, rural larking, full of sprightly and rollicking humour. Chief characters, the petty county gentry. The peasantry are drawn in caricature, usually friendly, and are shown in relation to their social superiors, not in their own life and reality. If these sketches were taken seriously, the peasantry would appear as drunken, quarrelsome, lying, dirty, unconsciously comical—with scarcely a single redeeming trait. The scene is south-western Cork.
All on the Irish Shore has been described (Irish Monthly) as “a blend of Lover and Lever (in his coarser rollicking days) refined by some of the literary flavour of Jane Barlow, but with none of the insight and sympathy of Irish Idylls. The same may be said of the Experiences of an Irish R.M., which moreover, contains here and there passages needlessly offensive to national feeling.” Titles of some chapters:—Fanny Fitz’s Gamble, A Grand Filly, High Tea at McKeown’s, A Nineteenth Century Miracle, &c.
N.B.—Messrs. Longmans have (April, 1910) issued a new uniform edition of the works of Somerville and Ross, at 3s. 6d. per volume.
⸺ FURTHER EXPERIENCES OF AN IRISH R.M. Pp. 315. (Longmans). 3s. 6d. 1908.