Let us take Carbery and grind its bones to make our bread,” Violet Martin wrote in a letter to Edith Oenone Somerville in 1889, “and we will serve it up to the spectator so that its mother wouldn’t know it.” Violet (1862–1915) was then twenty-six years old, and Edith (1858–1949) thirty-one; the two second cousins had recently finished collaborating on their first novel, An Irish Cousin, which would be published in London later that year. Violet, whose nom de plume became “Martin Ross,” was writing from her family’s ancestral home, Ross House, near Oughterard in County Galway. The bones she proposed to grind were those of “that fair and far-away district, the Barony of West Carbery, County Cork,” as Edith later called the place in her Irish Memories, “the ultimate corner of the ultimate speck of Europe—Ireland.” Martin’s humorous, off-the-cuff characterization is powerfully suggestive of the nature and purpose of their art.

Somerville & Ross were alive during the great days of diary-keeping and letter-writing.

In Somerville & Ross’s world, social hierarchies are strictly observed. “That they were snobs—in one sense of that word”—observes Conor Cruise O’Brien almost casually, followed naturally

from the fact that they belonged to the Irish landed gentry. They had to look down on other people in order to see them. Or so they sincerely felt. And they wanted to see them clearly, to place them socially: “Catholic