An Enthusiast : Edith Œ. Somerville's Novel of the Irish War of Independence

Abstract

An Enthusiast:Edith Œ. Somerville's Novel of the Irish War of Independence Nicole Pepinster Greene With the publication in 1915 of the third volume of the Irish R.M. short stories, In Mr. Knox's Country, the collaboration of Somerville and Ross was at the height of its popularity when Martin Ross died that same year.1 Readers might have reasonably concluded that this highly successful literary partnership had ended, and that Edith Somerville's writing career would end as well. But this was not the case. By 1917, Somerville began publishing memoirs and collections of essays and stories under the familiar literary trademark "Somerville and Ross," despite some occasional objections from the author's publisher, Longmans and Green.2 In 1919, she published the first of three novels that would appear under both names, Mount Music, followed by An Enthusiast (1921), and The Big House of Inver (1925), a popular and critical success. Longmans continued to reprint and republish the women's novels and collections of short stories, and their works gradually came to be included in the canon of Irish literature. An Enthusiast, however, is their only work of fiction that was never republished before Somerville's [End Page 98] death in 1949. In fact, it was reprinted just once, in 1985, and has remained almost unknown. Set in Ireland during the Anglo-Irish War of 1919 to 1921, An Enthusiast is the most overtly political and least representative of all Somerville and Ross fiction. A dark novel written when Ireland's future was still uncertain, it confronts the immediate political situation in southwest Cork and reflects the author's own divided loyalties. Its main protagonist, Dan Palliser, is an Anglo-Irish reformer who has rented his Big House to the returned colonialist, Lord Ducarrig, a Northern Unionist. Convinced that economic prosperity is the answer to Ireland's political problems, Dan—the author almost always refers to him as "Dan" rather than Palliser—farms the demesne and introduces the idea of cooperative farming to his neighbors. A loner who is alienated from his own class and family, Dan is befriended by the parish priest, Hugh Macnamara, SJ, who introduces him to the local Sinn Féin activist Eugene Cashen. Although Dan's efforts for reform are supported by both Father Hugh and Cashen, they are opposed by his family and by Nicholas Coyne, a nationalist entrepreneur and president of the Rural District Council. By the novel's end, Cashen is imprisoned, and Dan Palliser is killed on the steps of his own house, a victim of the crossfire between Northern Unionists and the IRA. Somerville herself was concerned about the reception of this wartime novel. She understood the artistic, commercial, and political risks in writing a novel focusing on the Troubles. To gain her readers' sympathy, Somerville writes in the preface that, "to be strictly impartial is to be equally disliked by all sides. In trying to keep an even keel . . . I have risked this disaster."3 Admittedly, Dan Palliser calls himself "Mr. Facing-Bothways" (E 74), and Somerville represents the local population as the victims of both the IRA and the British military forces. However, her Conservative and Unionist readership would not have considered her portrayals of both Father Hugh and Eugene Cashen as men of honor, nor her casting of the Unionist Ducarrig as one of the novel's villains, to be impartial. They would have had little sympathy for Dan, whose dilemma is singularly that of the Anglo-Irish, and, moreover, of the Anglo-Irish foolish enough to remain in an independent Irish republic. Lacking humor, nostalgia, dialect, picturesque characterizations, or hunting scenes, this novel simply did not meet the expectations of the Somerville and Ross readership. Reviews of An Enthusiast were generally positive, however. Despite Somerville's concerns about its reception by a Catholic audience, notices in the Irish press were somewhat more favorable than those in the British press, and the [End Page 99] novel was not the political disaster Somerville had feared.4 Reviewing for The Freeman's Journal, Susan Mitchell describes Somerville's "experiment" as "enormously interesting." She places Palliser in the tradition of Robert Emmet and Charles Stewart Parnell, and...