Irish Memories

Before the Irish Free State, before the Civil War, before 1916 reshaped everything, there existed a world of fox-hunting ladies, decaying manor houses, and a particular way of being Anglo-Irish that would not survive the century. This is that world, preserved in the sharp, affectionate, sometimes wickedly funny memories of two women who lived at its heart. Edith Somerville and her cousin Violet Martin wrote as "Somerville and Ross," and their collaboration produced some of the most vivid, gossipy, and revisionist memoirs in Irish literature. Based on their extensive diaries, Irish Memories traces their childhoods in County Cork, their coming out into society, their travels through an Ireland that was already vanishing, the great houses with their rituals and staff, the Catholic peasantry whose lives touched theirs only at the margins, the humor and hypocrisy of their own class. They made fun of everyone, including themselves. What makes these memoirs endure is their refusal to be simple nostalgia. Somerville and Ross skewer the Anglo-Irish gentry with the same wicked eye they turn on Irish peasants, creating a portrait that is loving, critical, and historically invaluable all at once. This is a vanished world captured by voices that knew its charms and its contradictions, and weren't about to let readers forget either.