1886 was a remarkable year for Irish literature. On 14 January, the first instalment of a novel aimed at demonstrating that “there was no room in Ireland for single women of talent and spirit” (Moynahan 1995: 165) appeared in print.[1] The text was A Drama in Muslin, subtitled A Realistic Novel, and its author, George Moore (1852-1933), Catholic Mayo landlord turned atheist and cosmopolitan man of letters, denounced “the ordeal of young Ascendancy women” (Kreilkamp 2006: 69) in a country on the verge of revolution. Alice Barton, the novel’s heroine, comes from the fading Galway gentry, is plain in look but intelligent and yearning for a goal in life. She suffers from lack of opportunities open to women, condemned to waste their lives while waiting for a rich husband who never appears. She eventually achieves self-realisation by becoming a novelist, marrying a doctor, and leaving Ireland. Moore himself rejected his social and religious roots and became an expatriate, preferring the English and French capitals to the isolation of Moore Hall and favouring the pursuit of a literary career over management of the family estate. In A Drama in Muslin, as well as in his later prose, the writer strongly suggested that self-exile was the only possible option open to those who were enterprising and freethinking. For women, expatriation was achieved through marriage.

Some days after the appearance of that first instalment, on 17 January, in a remote town in the west of Ireland, a life-changing encounter took place: that between Edith Œ. Somerville (1858-1949) and Violet Martin (1862-1915). The two were second cousins and belonged to an extended clan of Protestant landowners settled between Cork and Galway. Like the Moores, the Somervilles and the Martins were profoundly affected by the Land War and the subsequent land acts. In 1886, Somerville was twenty-eight and Martin was four years younger; both were still unmarried and determined to remain so. Each was struggling to build her own identity and earn a living, Somerville by painting, Martin by journalism. Their encounter led to a friendship that soon became the bedrock of a writing partnership, known as “E.Œ. Somerville and Martin Ross”, which lasted from 1887 to the latter’s death. They travelled extensively but remained rooted in Ireland, residing in their families’ big houses which they actively supported. When Martin died, Somerville continued to write under the joint signatures until her old age. To this day, they are mainly remembered for their comic Irish R.M. stories (1899-1915), and their masterpiece of social realism, The Real Charlotte (1894). The latter featured an unmarried woman, marked by physical unattractiveness, making her way in an Irish country town through intelligence and determination.

As can be glimpsed from this brief introduction, George Moore and Somerville and Ross offered both converging and diverging perspectives on the same question: how could middle- and upper-class Irish women pursue empowerment in the closing decades of the nineteenth century? This article examines the points of convergence in their views, particularly their shared emphasis on women’s work and economic independence, as well as their key differences. While Moore advocated for marriage and expatriation as necessary conditions for Irish women’s self-realisation, Somerville and Ross challenged such ideas, through both their personal experience and their fiction, most notably The Real Charlotte.

The article is structured in three parts. The first section juxtaposes Moore’s position with that of Somerville and Ross’s on a range of key themes. The second offers a concise comparative analysis of A Drama in Muslin and The Real Charlotte, two novels that share several elements and concerns but have, to date, rarely been examined in comparison.[2] The final section focuses on the protagonists of the two novels, exploring how each text imagined the possibilities and limitations of female agency in late Victorian Ireland.

Similar Starts, Different Directions

To this day, George Moore has hardly ever been discussed in connection with Somerville and Ross. Kreilkamp (2006) briefly links them in a chapter on the big house novel: while examining A Drama in Muslin, she argues that Alice’s sense of entrapment anticipates the struggles faced by Anglo-Irish women in the later fiction of Somerville and Ross, Elizabeth Bowen, Molly Keane, and Jennifer Johnston. Tillinghast (2008: 92) positions Moore and Somerville and Ross as representatives of the late-nineteenth-century landowning class who turned to writing not purely as an artistic pursuit, but also as a means of financial support. In a foreword to Stevens’s 2017 monograph on Somerville and Ross, Arnold (2017: 13-14) includes the three of them into the lost generation of “great Irish figures”. Stevens (2020) aligns Moore and Somerville and Ross as art enthusiasts and more recently (2025) compares representations of the woman artist type in Mildred Lawson (1888) and French Leave (1928). The two most recent biographies of Moore and Somerville (Frazier 2000; Lewis 2005) do not highlight significant connections between them. And yet, in his introduction Frazier (2000: xviii) emphasises a number of gaps in existing literature and calls for further research on “George Moore and Female Authors”. This article is a contribution towards filling this gap by exploring Moore’s connections with Somerville and Ross, with particular attention to questions of gender and female empowerment.

The limited scholarly engagement linking Moore with Somerville and Ross appears surprising, and not just because their backgrounds are strikingly similar. Points of contact between these authors, in fact, are several. First, neither Moore nor Somerville and Ross grew up dreaming of literary fame: Ross aspired to political writing, while Moore and Somerville initially pursued careers as painters. Their artistic dreams led them to Paris as pupils at private studios. Moore resided in the French capital from 1873 to 1879, when the Land War cut off his income and forced him to return. He soon decided to focus on writing. Though he did not again take up long-term residence in Paris, he visited often and maintained strong ties with avantgarde figures. Somerville “must have started as an art student about the same time as Moore was giving up his efforts to become a painter” (Moynahan 1995: 164). After studying in London and Düsseldorf, in the spring of 1884 she landed in Paris. Her limited finances allowed her to spend only a few months at a time in the city, but she was determined to make the most of her possibilities. It was only after meeting Martin Ross that her career shifted to writing, but she also worked as a painter all her life.

The 1880s were the years that marked Moore’s and Somerville and Ross’s literary beginnings: Moore made a first appearance in the market with A Modern Lover in 1883, while Somerville and Ross wrote their first joint effort, An Irish Cousin, between 1887 and 1888. 1894 was the year that secured their reputations: Esther Waters established Moore as a major novelist, while The Real Charlotte earned the co-authors the esteem of prominent contemporaries. Making money out of literary work was equally fundamental for Moore and Somerville and Ross: the former could not count on rents from his estate, while for the cousins, an income was crucial in their condition, that of unmarried daughters of deteriorating big houses.

All three moved between Ireland, London, and the Continent. Moore was an absentee landlord for most of his life: at the age of nine, he was sent to a Catholic boarding school in England. At eighteen, he inherited the family estate but moved to Paris soon afterwards. From an early stage, therefore, he “rejected his role as Moore of Moore Hall” (Tillinghast 2008: 90):[3] for him, freedom and self-realisation could not be achieved on an isolated Irish property. Paris and London were his elective choices. Moore Hall stood merely as a “dreaming house” (Moore 1930: 289) for its owner: it was his brother Maurice who resided there and attended to it (even though it was George who financed its upkeep). Inspired by his admiration for Yeats, he returned to Dublin in 1901 to take part in the Irish Literary Revival. A decade later, however, disillusioned with the movement and estranged from his brother, he sold the outlying lands of Moore Hall to the Land Commission – retaining ownership of the house but leaving it unoccupied – and left his native country permanently. He spent the remainder of his life in London. The big house was eventually burned by the IRA in 1923.

Somerville and Ross knew only too well the ranks of absentee landlords to which Moore belonged. Their brothers fell into the same category. Two years after Moore inherited his estate in 1870, Violet Martin’s father died and her brother Robert became the new owner of Ross, Co. Galway. He leased the estate and headed to London to pursue a literary career, while the rest of the family, constrained by limited financial means, relocated to the north side of Dublin. When Mrs Martin brought the family back to Ross in 1888, they found it in an appalling state. Somerville’s brother Cameron, the heir to Drishane, Co. Cork, had a successful career in the army and passionately cultivated his music. Successive land acts did not allow him to live on the Drishane rents and he showed no interest in the property. Even after his retirement, it was his sister who effectively ran house and land and went to great lengths to preserve them. Despite never even hoping to inherit, Somerville and Ross were deeply attached to their ancestral big houses. They too travelled considerably –[4] some of their finest works were written abroad – yet remained residents of their native country, never moving out of Drishane and Ross, into which a good part of their literary income was continuously channelled. Violet Martin used to do exhausting manual labour in and around the house, possibly compromising her already fragile health.[5] Somerville never left Drishane even in the years of big house burnings, when it was repeatedly raided but never set ablaze – conceivably owing to her presence there. Thanks to her efforts, the house still stands today.

Thus, if Moore’s satisfaction rested “upon recognition as a literary artist” (Frazier 2000: 69), Somerville and Ross’s happiness was deeply intertwined with Irish concerns. If for Moore nationality was “an elective affinity” (Frazier 2000: 468), for Somerville and Ross the self could be nowhere but in Ireland. Differently from Moore, but also from Wilde, Yeats, and Shaw, the two women did not pursue literary fame to the capital of the empire: London was for visits to friends and relatives, but life was in their Irish countryside.

Personal peculiarities have often determined more critical interest than the literary output of the parties: Somerville and Ross’s exclusive, life-long partnership has exercised a fascination for generations of readers, prompting speculations about the nature of their relationship. Like Moore, Somerville and Ross occupied a space outside conventional sexual norms, as they were neither active homosexuals nor married heterosexuals. Moore’s fluid sexual identity and eccentric persona, along with his friendships and disputes with major figures of the Revival have often drawn more interest than his writings.

A frequent criticism that has been directed at Moore is that he had “no definitive style or allegiance” (Montague 2012: xvi): indeed, his production is impossible to categorise as it varies immensely. Starting under the influence of French realism and naturalism, he then slid towards symbolism and the investigation of the inner realities of life. His fiction has been placed “at the heart of Irish modernism” (Grubgeld 2020: 115).[6] While he addressed the decline of his own class only in A Drama in Muslin,[7] Somerville and Ross’s entire oeuvre was grounded in the world of the Ascendancy. Their subject matter, and the nostalgia with which it is often depicted, have caused the cousins to be placed among Victorians rather than Moderns, and too often have they been “seen as retrograde” (Stevens 2017: 155). Starting out experimenting with Gothic conventions, they drew on the big house tradition and modelled it from their own distinctive perspective. They shared with Moore an interest in the complexities of modern reality, portrayed with anthropological accuracy; works such as The Real Charlotte and The Big House of Inver penetrate the deeper strata of consciousness through the hidden drives of the human mind; the power of sexuality is explored; gender roles are played with. In his attempt to situate Moore and Somerville and Ross within the modernist canon, Frazier (2006: 114) expresses the difference in scale when he writes that the “fictions of Yeats, Wilde, Bram Stoker, Somerville and Ross and James Stephens exhibit one or two aspects of modernist style; Moore’s novels have the full complement”.

One further point of convergence regards the swift decline of their posthumous reputations. While the full range of causes is too complex to address here, certain factors can nevertheless be identified. A major factor was surely that neither had any clear affiliation with a single national literary tradition. As has been said, Moore left Ireland at a young age, returning only occasionally and settling in Dublin for a decade to lend his talent to the Revival, in which he was at first an active participant before entering into conflict with its members. This shift from early alignment to open hostility has resulted in his uneasy position within literary canons, despite the fact that virtually every scholar of the Revival would consider Moore’s The Untilled Field, The Lake, and Hail and Farewell! as central Revival texts. In London, “he was treated as too sexy and French, or too rebellious and Irish” (Frazier 2000: xiv). As for Somerville and Ross, the Anglo-Irish subject of their oeuvre excluded them from the English canon and at the same time gave them an uneasy place in the new Irish state. Only recently has their work started to be claimed by critical collections of Irish literature. Also, their rendering of West Cork speech has finally been praised as more authentic than the peasant speech in many works staged at the Abbey Theatre.[8]

A second reason for the posthumous marginalisation shared by these authors may be the difficulty in situating them within given categories. Moore was both a conservative landowner and a member of avant-garde circles. He declared himself a Home Ruler, but then issued a series of sketches in French, explicitly entitled in its English version Parnell and His Island, in which he scornfully mocked Irish patriotic feelings, a work he would later disavow as ignorant and merely apprentice in nature. He eventually lost interest in Irish politics and in 1923 declared himself to be “purely a man of letters” (cited in Frazier 2000: 434). Somerville and Ross too embraced both conservative and reformist ideas: their “Unionist political strand contradicted their cultural identification with the Irish, their feudalism conflicted with their feminism. […] [They] were both the colonizers and the colonized, keepers as well as breakers of the status quo” (Chen 1998: 17). Somerville and Ross were committed advocates of women’s rights,[9] yet forever indulgent towards profligate brothers and nephews, readily patching up their tangled finances. Concerning their stance on Irish politics, Ross died a Unionist – albeit a more liberal one than other members of her family – while Somerville, contrarily to Moore, came to embrace the Irish cause in her later years and supported Sinn Fein during the War of Independence. Yet her nostalgia for the feudal bond between master and tenant surfaces ubiquitously in her texts, both fictional and non-fictional.

Thirdly, their relationship with the Irish Revival may have had a hand in their difficult positioning within the canon. Moore played a major role in the movement, forming a highly visible friendship with Yeats before their equally public rupture, and proceeded to burn bridges with the rest of the Coole circle by publishing his scandalous if thoroughly enjoyable memoir, Hail and Farewell! (1911-14).[10] Somerville and Ross, on their part, preferred to steer clear of the movement. Their scepticism only added to an already defined position, as they always kept their distance from the literary life of Dublin. The two cousins had personal connections with forefront figures of the Revival: Augusta Gregory was Martin Ross’s second cousin, and their correspondence shows a friendly relationship; at Coole, she was introduced to Yeats, AE, and the rest of the circle. Gregory and Yeats were extremely impressed by The Real Charlotte and “its indictment of ‘shoneens’” (Clare 2014: 97). But despite Gregory’s stubborn attempts at counting her and Somerville among the Revivalists,[11] the two collaborators remained detached from the group and saw their own work as distinct. Jamison (2016: 88) and Stevens (2017: 113-14) demonstrate that they were well aware of Revivalist work but could not bring themselves to feel enthusiasm for it. Of Diarmuid and Grania (1901), co-authored by Moore and Yeats, Ross wrote: “a strange mix of saga and modern French situations […]. If this is the lofty purity of the Irish drama I am indeed mystified. But I believe that Yeats and George Moore both believe that it is very grand to be the victim of a variety of fancies” (cited in Lewis 1989: 253-54).[12] They, inexorable realists, thought the Revival too prone to ideals and sentimentality. Moreover, they did not “approve of something that had been brought back to life with so much artificial respiration” (Lewis 1989: 238), and in particular considered the “peasant speech” in many Abbey’s plays too inauthentic (Clare 2014: 97). Stevens (2017: 26) suggests that there might also have been a reluctance to engage with an organisation largely dominated by men who tended to subordinate female expression to their overarching objectives.

Interestingly, Moore came to reject the Revival for reasons not too far from those that had prevented Somerville and Ross from joining it in the first place. In Hail and Farewell!, the Revival’s central figures are portrayed as actors performing against an artificial backdrop, oddly detached from the everyday realities of Ireland – just as Somerville and Ross had always perceived them.

Despite the parallels highlighted so far, there is no evidence of either friendship or correspondence between Moore and the Somerville and Ross duo. In fact, their relationship was notably not warm. Somerville and Ross’s letters attest that they read at least some of Moore’s works and did not like them very much. His patronising attitude in representing women disturbed them, but they attentively read Hail and Farewell!. Ross seems to have been more critical of the Mayo writer. Commenting on Ave (the first volume of Moore’s trilogy Hail and Farewell!) in her correspondence with Lady Gregory, she denounced Moore’s “occasional lapse into ‘second-rate’ writing’”, his “leisurely superiority” and “franker impertinence” (cited in Stevens 2017: 77-78). However, she found the book “penetratingly well written” (78). For his part, Moore had an ambiguous and often condescending stance towards the duo. In Parnell and his Island, he talked with contempt of sporting and vigorous girls – that is, women of the Somerville and Ross’s sort. While sketching an Anglo-Irish family, he wrote: “Two of the girls are tall, strong, ugly young women. […] They think nothing of riding fifteen miles to a hunt, hunting all day and riding home in the evening; and next day they are ready to play a tennis match or to drive thirty miles to a ball” (Moore 1887: 39). Somerville and Ross, accomplished riders and passionate foxhunters, often spent a full day in the saddle and considered athletic prowess central to their identity.[13] Moore did recognise the literary skill of Somerville and Ross: their work was commercially successful, something he – who struggled for popular acclaim – did not ignore. However, his praise was often tinged with gender bias and aesthetic elitism: he probably saw them as talented lady writers producing amusing but minor work in terms of artistic value, not as peers in the serious literary enterprise he believed himself to be leading. In keeping with his general attitude towards women artists,[14] he did not place them on the same level as men engaged in what he considered the higher pursuits of literature.

Moore and Somerville and Ross met in person at a dinner in Dublin in 1910 (Lewis 2005: 248). The literary partners found the man “very entertaining and discomposing and alarming” (cited in Lewis 2005: 249). Somerville met him again in 1926, this time in Richmond, and confirmed that she “didn’t like the drowsy old wasp” (cited in Lewis 2005: 351). While visiting her friend Ethel Smyth in London, she spent time with John Singer Sargent and Moore, though with the latter she once again found little mutual sympathy. Surely, they had very different public behaviours: Moore notoriously delighted in shocking his dining companions with provocative anecdotes; Somerville was a witty conversationalist but adhered to a more Victorian sense of decorum and did not like blasphemy. As both her biographers Cummins (1952) and Lewis (2005: 381) recount, Somerville remembered that one time “quite suddenly, George Moore said something quite indecent – a remark he shouldn’t have made to any woman. So I just left the room. He did it deliberately to shock me. He was like a half dead wasp that might sting at any moment. You couldn’t trust him” (Cummins 1952: 111-12).

Furthermore, the authors held markedly different attitudes towards religion. Moore had a troubled relationship with religion throughout his life. Raised as a Catholic – even though the Moores descended from an English Protestant settler family that had converted to Catholicism for marital reasons – he publicly declared himself a Protestant in The Irish Times in 1903. This claim was met with scepticism, as he had notoriously developed “a prosy rationalist atheism” (Frazier 2000: 201). Moore consistently presented religious institutions and the clergy as detrimental both to his native country and to art. His major works – including A Drama in Muslin, The Untilled Field, and The Lake – “depict individuals struggling with Catholic beliefs” (Clare 2023: 195).[15] Somerville and Ross, by contrast, never openly challenged religious institutions. Their relationship to the Anglican Church of Ireland was shaped by social belonging and cultural continuity. They attended religious functions as a social duty; Somerville played the organ in her local church in Castletownshend every Sunday for most of her life. Their fiction often registers an ironic distance from clerical authority and religious convention, reflecting a broader Anglo-Irish Protestant milieu in which the Church functioned as a key social institution rather than a site of spirituality. Unlike Moore’s work, however, and consistent with their generally more conciliatory approach, it does not mount a sustained or explicit attack on religious institutions.

If Somerville and Ross viewed George Moore as a bewildering wasp – the animal metaphor aptly conveying the complex layers of their judgement – and he failed to recognise their mastery underlying the comic turn, it is indubitable that they shared certain major concerns. Their third novels, A Drama in Muslin and The Real Charlotte, both written in their authors’ early thirties during years of widespread land agitation, present striking parallels in settings, themes, characterisation, and social critique. They make a compelling case study that deserves closer critical examination.

Anatomising the Irish Gentry: A Drama in Muslin and The Real Charlotte

Both A Drama in Muslin and The Real Charlotte portray Irish gentry life in the 1880s: the former is set between 1882 and 1884, in Galway and in Dublin, while Somerville and Ross’s novel takes place slightly later, from 1887 to 1888, shifting between Dublin and the fictional western country town of Lismoyle. A Drama in Muslin was strongly influenced by French realism; The Real Charlotte has been called a “great Balzacian novel” (Moynahan 1995: 6). Both were met with harsh criticism from contemporary reviewers: among the many reasons for which they were considered offensive was the perceived crudeness in their portrayal of characters, particularly female ones.[16] Neither work romanticised its women characters, and both have at their centre unconventional, unattractive protagonists. Significantly, the depiction of female sexual desire was condemned as vulgar. The reception of A Drama in Muslin was so unfavourable from Irish friends and London critics alike that Moore resolved to publish in French and steer clear of his native country for many years. Somerville and Ross were in Paris when reviews of The Real Charlotte started to come out. Their families and friends were not enthusiastic either. The bitterness they felt may not have been very different from Moore’s. The fact was that all three of them, drawing on their personal experiences,[17] had positioned themselves as critical outsiders of their class by unsparingly exposing its flaws.

At the centre of A Drama in Muslin is a family of Catholic gentry, the Bartons. The political background is very vivid and social tensions are etched. By deliberately employing Darwinian overtones, Moore anatomises the rituals of a culture he saw as doomed to extinction. Arthur Barton is a dilettante painter, a narcissist detached from reality; he fails to understand the changing times and prefers escapism, repeatedly imagining himself hunting down “village ruffians” on a white horse at the head of a column of landlords, alternatively dressed as Julius Caesar or Napoleon (Moore 1981: 238, 105, 123). The only reaction he has to a death-threatening letter is a temporary inability to tune his guitar (Moore 1981: 133).

The Real Charlotte has many plot lines, in an attempt to capture the society of Lismoyle in its entirety, and there is less explicit reference to the political background.[18] However, even if the Ascendancy family is not the main focus, the social life of Lismoyle revolves around the Dysarts, whose prestige seems untouched by the land agitation. Yet, cracks are visible beneath the surface: Sir Benjamin suffered a stroke that has made him an invalid. His frustrated desire for authority mirrors that of his class. His wife mistakes weeds for asters, planting with satisfaction a whole flowerbed with the former without recognising the difference. Her horticultural ineptitude reflects her wider judgment. The son and heir, Christopher, is a Mr Barton in-the-making, though he possesses more clarity of vision. He too has vague artistic aspirations and gets stuck in a lethargic routine. Ultimately, the results are the same. Christopher’s lack of assertiveness allows his agent to embezzle funds – echoing the case of Mr. Barton’s agent, who ultimately proves more successful than the landlord, as his daughter “bags” the marquis whom the Bartons have been relentlessly pursuing. Christopher’s feeble courtship of Francie and his lack of sexual vitality culminate in his failure to marry. His attitude towards women closely resembles that of the male characters in A Drama in Muslin, diffident, evasive, indecisive, and reluctant to commit to marriage.

Despite the ominous signs and the looming Land League threat, both novels conclude with the gentry family’s life essentially unaltered. The time for stark change has not come yet. Nevertheless, in both works, the trajectory is unmistakable: neither Moore nor Somerville and Ross harboured illusions about the ultimate fate of Anglo-Irish landlords. If the results are the same, it is the authors’ attitude towards the inhabitants of the big house that marks the difference. In depicting the Bartons, Moore displayed no sympathy for the “mortgaged landowners who mistook injustice for eternity” (Wilson Foster 1987: 125). By totally detaching his heroine Alice from family, class, and country, he was anticipating and illustrating his own choice. For Moore, the gentry simply had “no redeeming virtue” (Kiberd 2001: 292). Somerville and Ross had a more ambivalent relationship with their class. As noted by different critics, they showed an indulgence towards Christopher Dysart that is lacking for Mr Barton. Moreover, The Real Charlotte displays a tendency to conflate Christopher’s social rank with an ineffable sense of superiority.[19] Young Dysart’s personality presents many similarities with Somerville’s brother Cameron, who was “indecisive, ineffectual and secretive” (Lewis 2005: 36); like Christopher and Mr Barton, Colonel Somerville used to take refuge in music. Somerville and Ross did not spare the Ascendancy and their stagnating rituals from their “devastatingly comic eye” (Kreilkamp 2006: 71), yet they remained somewhat sympathetic in their lucid critique. Though exposing its faults and anticipating its ultimate destiny, the partners never got to fully condemn the system and strongly identified with their Ascendancy roots.

Agency Claimed: Alice Barton and Charlotte Mullen

In A Drama in Muslin, five friends fresh out from a convent school are thrust into a brutally competitive marriage market where they are destined to fail due to unrealistically high expectations. As they wait for a husband to appear, the girls replicate the fate of the older generation of local “spinsters”. As noted by Frehner (1999: 30), Moore was “one of the first if not the first to make spinsterhood a thematic focus in an Irish novel”.[20] If there are five main characters embodying alternative destinies for women, at the centre is the one who gets away, Alice Barton.

The novel centres on Alice’s gradual realisation of her abilities and the growing awareness that she cannot pursue them in Ireland. At first, she appears as a paralysed victim of the system: ensnared in the same mechanisms that entrap her fellow muslin martyrs, yet painfully aware of such constraints, she experiences an increasing sense of isolation. She withdraws into her room, immersing herself in reading and attempting, like her father, to escape into a world of fantasy. In Dublin for the season, she falls in love with a London writer – John Harding, possibly an alter ego of Moore, present in some of his other novels – who does not reciprocate her love but encourages her to write and predicts her expatriation. Helped by Harding, she slowly constructs her identity by contributing light literature to the London press, an endeavour that affords her both self-confidence and an income, gradually establishing and consolidating a professional career.[21] Her break from the lethargy of her peers is furthered by her marriage to  a dependable doctor and relocation with him to suburban London for a life of middle-class industriousness.

Alice and Dr Reed’s union is based on respect and sympathy rather than romantic love. She is enlightened and progressive, but moderate and a realist, preferring honest materialism to “foolish hope and wild aspiration” (Moore 1981: 187). Mrs Barton tries to prevent her from contracting what she deems an unsuitable marriage, as she has previously done, successfully, with the younger sister Olive,[22] but Alice is steadfast in her decision.

Moore’s heroine is characterised by an unremarkable appearance combined with a very remarkable intellect. In this respect, whether deliberately or not, Charlotte, Somerville and Ross’s titular character, closely resembles her. In both texts, Alice’s and Charlotte’s lack of physical appeal is continuously, painfully emphasised. Alice has “not a feature that [is] either regular or attractive” (Moore 1981: 33). Her body fails to conform to Victorian standards of feminine beauty: her hair lacks luxuriance, her shoulders are “pointed”, and her hands are “sinewy and strong” – the very antithesis of the frail, helpless, sickly femininity celebrated in Victorian discourse, embodied by her sister Olive. Charlotte’s “thick” hands are likewise associated with strength (Somerville and Ross 2011: 19). Alice’s and Charlotte’s bodies are robust and healthy, but their physical vigour is coded as indelicate and masculine, as it deviates from the ideal of the female angel, conventionally imagined as a “natural invalid”.[23] Like Alice, Charlotte appears “startingly plain” (19): her abundant brown hair cannot compensate for her yellowish, “opaque skin”, “squat figure” (19), and the “hard lines of her face” (44). Her loss of youth is underscored by the deep “lines about her prominent mouth and chin”, and the “flabby pallor” of her “broad cheeks” (19).

Yet in both cases the absence of attractiveness is counterbalanced by an abundance of intelligence, a quality highlighted almost as often and contrasted to those around them – most notably to their counterparts, the angelic, gold-haired, and featherbrained Olive in A Drama in Muslin and Francie in The Real Charlotte. In the descriptions of both Alice and Charlotte, their eyes emerge as a privileged site of meaning, set in deliberate contrast to the rest of their appearance. When Alice is absorbed in meditation, her eyes, “like a grey lake in a sudden sun”, are “flooded with bright attractiveness”, and the “formless features” gain, “through expression, a precision not their own” (Moore 1981: 33). Similarly, in Charlotte’s initial portrayal, “only her eyes” are presented as “bright and untired” (Somerville and Ross 2011: 19). In both instances, the vivacity of the mind is reflected in the brightness of the gaze.

By contrast, Olive and Francie are consistently depicted as beautiful but soulless. Olive is described as lacking a soul altogether: “in the beautiful framework nothing was wanting but a mind. She was, in a word, a human flower – a rose – a carnation that a wicked magician had endowed with the power of speech” (Moore 1981: 4); in her “beauty of perfect proportions no soul exists” (32). Francie’s frivolity is articulated in similar if less cruel terms: “this delicate, cool, youthful creature, with her provoking charm, could not possibly be weighted with the responsibility of a soul” (Somerville and Ross 2011: 120). In their characterisation of female figures, then, Moore and Somerville and Ross articulate a bleak vision of women’s role in society, one that reflects a broader cultural logic expressed by Naomi Wolf’s observation that “women are allowed a mind or a body but not both” (Wolf 1991: 59).

Both Alice and Charlotte are practical and lucid, possessing a clear awareness of their strengths and weaknesses as well as a deep understanding of the workings of the world. Their stark clarity of vision engenders a sense of loneliness, yet simultaneously grants them a position of unique insight and advantage. Due to the combination of their perceived physical shortcomings and their clear-sightedness, Alice and Charlotte cannot fit into late-nineteenth century expectations about women. Both realise as much and try instead to carve out an identity for themselves that is detached from social conventions. The main difference between them is that Alice has strong innate moral instincts, while Charlotte is morally ambiguous: the former is generous and sympathetic, the latter is a self-serving grabber. Alice is a heroine, Charlotte is “one of the nineteenth century’s most complex, unhappy, and convincing villains” (Tillinghast 2008: 75). And yet, as “unappealing and amoral” (Weekes 1990: 212) as she is, Somerville and Ross depicted Charlotte as a victim of an unfair society, sometimes even inviting forgiveness of her flaws: “There is pathos as well as humiliation in the thought that such a thing as a soul can be stunted by the trivialities of personal appearance, and it is a fact not beyond the reach of sympathy that each time Charlotte stood before her glass her ugliness spoke to her of failure, and goaded her to revenge” (Somerville and Ross 2011: 300). Charlotte is not a muslin martyr, but she is a martyr: in a culture that values female appearance above all and presents marriage as the only opportunity for women to do something for themselves, Charlotte is a victim just as Alice is. Born female, she is at first excluded from the world of business in which she excels: the management of the Dysart estate, which had been her father’s, does not pass down to her despite her qualifications but goes to the mediocre assistant, Lambert. Her scarcity of physical charm surpasses Alice’s and borders on deformity. In this respect, she is closer to Cecilia, Alice’s hunchback friend. Charlotte’s and Cecilia’s awareness of their repulsiveness makes them resentful of the world, but Cecilia’s reaction is one of closure: she loathes any pleasure, any man, and at the end escapes society by entering a convent.[24] Charlotte, instead, never loses her capacity for desire: she hopes until the last page of the book, chooses action over seclusion, and manages to dominate the society that condemns her to unhappiness; the people of Lismoyle recognise her as an authoritative figure. Charlotte is a model of feminism and resistance in a way that neither Cecilia nor Alice achieve.

At the end, Charlotte does not succeed in obtaining what she most wants: union with Lambert. The last chapter of A Drama in Muslin, instead, shows Alice two years after her wedding and departure from Ireland, her life presented as fulfilling. But Alice’s emancipation is partially realised through her adherence to traditional roles in marriage, motherhood, and domestic life. Jaime de Pablos (2009: 242) convincingly observes that Moore wanted to demonstrate that a woman could develop her professional side without compromising her role as a mother and a wife, and that intellect and femininity were not incompatible. However, Alice attends to household duties and childcare before sitting down to write (Moore 1981: 327-28): domestic care rests entirely on her shoulders. In this respect, the Reeds’ home conforms to the prototypical Victorian model of domesticity.[25] Furthermore, it remains unclear whether Alice would have pursued or achieved personal growth were it not for the men she encounters. She is first inspired and then guided in the construction of her career by Harding, in whom she places a blind faith. Prior to their meeting, she feels lost and lacking a purpose, uncertain as how to channel her potential. Her emancipation from family and country is completed through her marriage to Dr Reed. In stark contrast, Charlotte is neither helped nor validated by a man: rather, she emerges as a fiercely independent woman with economic, social, and romantic aspirations of her own. It is she who guides Lambert in his career as a land agent, not the reverse: it is to her that he repeatedly turns for practical and economic assistance. Her keen business acumen establishes her as a central and authoritative presence in Lismoyle. She masterfully schemes and plots until she acquires the farm of Gurthnamuckla, which she turns into a thriving enterprise.

Additionally, Alice’s writing is presented as more commercially than artistically rewarding.[26] Neither her husband nor her career appears to stir emotion in her: all in all, she lacks Charlotte’s passion. Although she shares with Charlotte a steady will, she lacks Charlotte’s titanic mind, which creates ambitious schemes and carries them out with determination, fashioning a satisfying future “out of the slightest and vulgarest materials” (Somerville and Ross 2011: 285).

Thus, even though the last image of Charlotte is that of a defeated woman, her ultimate destiny appears more fulfilling to today’s readers, whereas Alice’s tastes sour. One is left with the feeling that Alice could have done better. She is rebellious, yet somewhat resigned as to what she can achieve. Her realism proves her salvation in that she realises she must take action in order to avoid the fate of her peers, but that pragmatism simultaneously stands as a limit. While Alice rejects the boundaries imposed on her by family and society, she nonetheless imposes new limitations upon herself. In contrast, Charlotte dares to aim higher. Alice desires a marriage based on cooperation; she desires a sexual relationship, but not an intense one. Charlotte yearns for passionate love: sexual desire is sorely felt by her. After Lambert’s wedding with Francie, sexual frustration and fury at having been deceived assume overwhelming proportions. Her desire for love remains unfulfilled, and she ultimately remains solitary.[27] Alice loves writing but is contented with being a hack writer, while Charlotte dreams of taking control of Gurthnamuckla and, through a series of calculated moves, ultimately acquires and personally manages the estate. Although her methods are morally questionable, her acumen and indomitable spirit are undeniably impressive.

Conclusion

In the light of what I have discussed, it is evident that the characters of Alice and Charlotte both challenge the narrow options available to them, while revealing alternative models of female empowerment. They transgress gender roles, family expectations, and social propriety. Neither aligns with the aesthetic standards that define women’s social value; both find alternatives to mercenary marriage, retreat to the convent, or dependent spinsterhood. Rather than fading into invisibility, they assert their presence through their abilities, cultivating their skills and reaping economic rewards.

But although Alice escapes the paralysis and the domestic martyrdom that afflict her peers, her choice reflects compromise. Also, she secures limited autonomy within the conventional frameworks of marriage and domesticity. In making his heroine a lady writer carrying out her professional activity from her study while supervising the household, Moore did not defy prevailing notions of female gentility. Alice’s rebellion is marked by pragmatism and self-awareness, but, in the eye of twenty-first century readers, is ultimately constrained.

Charlotte, in contrast, carries out her self-development in a disconcertingly modern way. Her initial situation appears more extreme, more hopeless than Alice’s: after all, Alice is a young woman of a “marriageable” age, while Charlotte is over forty, an unusual age for women having adventures in nineteenth-century novels. She has limited financial means to start with, no family to support her, and no man comes to rescue her. Nevertheless, she becomes the central axis around which the action revolves, asserting a dominant role in the unfolding of the events.

Discussing A Drama in Muslin in the wider context of the Irish bildungsroman, Grubgeld points out that “[i]n contrast to the male protagonist of the Bildungsroman tradition, Alice does not ascend socially or financially” (2025: 144). Alice enacts her rebellion by moving downward and outward: she rejects her class and the status it confers, making her decision irrevocable by marrying “below” and moving to London to take part in the great metropolis’s bustle.[28] Alice anticipates a path more common to the Bildungsroman after the turn of the century, offering us a predecessor of Stephen Dedalus.

As for Charlotte, she moves inward and upward: she does not reject Ireland, but establishes her reign exactly there, sinks her roots in Lismoyle, acquiring rather than losing land and houses. She is on her way to dominate, successfully, the class into which Alice was born. Neither the Bartons nor the Dysarts have the ability to look after their interests, leaving an area of opportunity open for the acquisitive Charlotte, who, by contrast, possesses the energy her social superiors lack. Her ultimate failure to secure romantic fulfilment is offset by other triumphs. She reclaims agency in a world that would render her invisible due to her origins, sex, appearance, and “spinster” status.

In conclusion, I argue that Somerville and Ross created a more audacious and unsettling figure of resistance than did Moore. Though cast as a villain rather than a heroine like Alice, Charlotte emerges as a compelling feminist presence. She is exactly the type of woman Moore had pronounced impossible for Ireland and in Ireland. Despite her professional, middle-class origins, Charlotte’s love for the land, her rootedness in the Irish countryside, and her unmarried status align her closely with her creators. In crafting this complex and enigmatic character – and in the lives they themselves led – Somerville and Ross proved Moore wrong: there was room in Ireland for single women of talent and spirit. They probably did not think about it, but they certainly would have had a good laugh.

Notes

[1] In Court and Society Review. The volume edition was published later that year by Vizetelly.

[2] A sustained comparative examination of A Drama in Muslin and The Real Charlotte has been done by María Elena Jaime de Pablos (2005). Jaime de Pablos juxtaposes the two novels as they both feature women who are extraordinarily beautiful (respectively, Olive and Francie) and women who are extraordinarily ugly (Cecilia and Charlotte), and examines how female physical appearance affects women’s lives within the context of late nineteenth-century Ireland.

[3] Interestingly, Moore Hall was designed by John Roberts, the architect who also designed Tyrone House, the direct inspiration for Somerville and Ross’s The Big House of Inver (1925).

[4] They also travelled on commission of magazines. See Jamison (2016: 105-30).

[5] Ross House was eventually sold by her niece Barbara Martin in 1924. In 1930 it suffered a fire that ruined the interior.

[6] Modern Irish fiction has been said to begin with Moore (Hughes 1971: xviii; Jeffares 1982: 202), especially with The Untilled Field (1902). On links between The Untilled Field and Joyce’s Dubliners, see Corcoran-Kelly (2012) and Frazier (2000: 307).

[7] And in Parnell and His Island (1887), the non-fictional reworking of the social critique developed in the novel.

[8] On Somerville and Ross’s use of Hiberno-English, see Kelleher (2016).

[9] They became President and Vice-President of the Cork branch of the Irish Women’s Franchise League.

[10] On Moore’s role in the Revival and his Dublin years between 1901 and 1911, see O’Donovan (1987: 117-41); Frazier (2000: 273-374).

[11] Letter from Martin to Somerville, 30 April 1905: “I must tell you that Augusta was here yesterday, and was rampant that I should write a play for the Abbey Street Theatre, protestations of total inadequacy were put by as the idle wind – want of time ditto – apparently they want what they are good enough to call a Shoneen play. I suppose that means middle class vulgarity. […] When I divulged the fact that you had faint aspirations towards a play […] Augusta was enraptured – ‘A week at Coolie would do it. We could give you all the hints necessary for stage effects etc – even write a scenario for you – the characters and plot picked from your books – I will look through them at once –’ I gave no further encouragement of any sort – and said we were full up” (cited in Lewis 1989: 273-74).

[12] This does not mean that Somerville and Ross did not share the Revivalists’ interest in Irish folklore. Critics have analysed Somerville and Ross’s reworking of the story of Diarmuid and Grainne in their own fiction. See McNamara (2006); Stevens (2017: 133-38). Stevens also explores the influence of Irish childhood folklore on their writings and in Somerville’s art. For a discussion of points of contact between Somerville and Ross and the Irish Revival, see Clare (2014: 97-99). Clare reclaims Wilde, Shaw, and Somerville and Ross for a wider concept of Irish Literary Revival. He argues that these authors are usually disqualified from the movement because of a “perceived Britishness” in their work (91), but points out that the entire Revival “was underwritten by […] the cultural Britishness of most of its key participants” (93), and calls attention to the many aspects these writers shared with celebrated members of the Revivalist movement, such as their Protestant background, nationalist sympathies, anti-English feelings, affection for Irish folklore, and the influence of French art. Clare adds that Somerville and Ross’s sentimental attitude towards the old Anglo-Irish way of life “fits in with the Revival’s poignant laments for the fall of the Ascendancy” (98). Their dislike of the rising Catholic middle classes was shared by Yeats, Gregory, Moore, and Synge.

[13] Somerville’s essay “Not the Woman’s Place” underscored the role of sports, especially lawn tennis, bicycling, and hunting in modelling empowered feminine identities (Somerville 1920).

[14] Investigating female presence in 1880s Paris painting studios, Stevens underlines how “the female artist’s sexuality dominates Moore’s discussion” (2017: 76). See also Welby (2023).

[15] On Moore’s hostility towards the Catholic religion and his desire to separate Irish nationality from Catholicism, see Clare (2023). On the role of the Catholic Church in shaping popular conceptions of women in Ireland, see Jaime de Pablos (2000: 123-201).

[16] A Drama in Muslin was “too modern by far in morals and politics to be welcome either in England or Ireland. Its point of view is against God, Catholicism, landlordism and Dublin Castle, in favour of free love, vocations for women, metropolitan life and science. […] There was something in it to offend everyone” (Frazier 2006: 116). To Somerville and Ross’s dismay, The Real Charlotte was proclaimed “unsympathetic, hard and harsh”, (Weekly Sun, reported in Somerville 1917: 236) and its characters “sordid-minded” (Lady’s Pictorial, 19 May 1894).

[17] In A Drama in Muslin, the priest’s sermon was inspired by Moore’s stay at Tillyra Castle (Edward Martyn’s estate). He was not allowed to set foot there after the book was published, so offended was Mrs Martyn. The Dublin season and the Castle ball were based on Moore’s personal experiences in 1884 and 1885. In The Real Charlotte, Lady Dysart was modelled after Somerville’s mother, while Charlotte was inspired by Emily Herbert, a relative who had cheated Somerville out of an inheritance. The Dublin scenes were based on Martin Ross’s knowledge of the city.

[18] Irish political events will directly influence the plot in Somerville and Ross’s later novels, Mount Music (1919) and An Enthusiast (1921).

[19] Here Somerville and Ross’s class-consciousness surfaces, an attitude that emerges most obviously from their life-writing. Martin Ross observed that “one indefensible position has been replaced by another, feudal power by clerical” (Somerville and Ross 1917: 32). Her perception of the gradual displacement of the Anglo-Irish by the clergy aligns her with Moore, who expressed no allegiance to the emerging Ireland, which he regarded as dominated by a stultifying Catholic conservatism. See Frazier (2000: 309, 328).

[20] The novel has been regarded as a story on the “Woman Question”. On Moore’s feminism, see Frazier (2000: 118, 126-27); and Jaime de Pablos (2000). Jaime de Pablos extensively explores Moore’s representations of female characters that fight against the injustices and limitations imposed by Irish society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and thus examines his literary works set in Ireland: A Drama in Muslin, The Untilled Field, The Lake, and the stories “Albert Nobbs”, “Priscilla and Emily Lofft”, and “Sarah Gwynn”, collected in Celibate Lives (1927). Jaime de Pablos observes that none of Moore’s heroines conform to the ideal model of mother and wife imposed by the Church, the State, and society at large (2000: 302). She demonstrates how the Irish author challenged gender stereotypes by repeatedly portraying women with “masculine” traits (such as rationality, desire for personal and intellectual growth, the pursuit of economic independence through paid work) and men with “feminine” features. Central to Moore’s ethical vision is the primacy of self-realisation: when the interests of the community clash with those of the individual seeking to develop their true self, the author sides with the latter’s rights (303). On how Moore combined the Land War and contemporary feminist concerns, see O’Toole (2013: 80-82).

[21] Moore supported the integration of Irish women into the workforce and exposed their marginalisation in many of his texts. On Moore and Irish women’s work, see Jaime de Pablos (2000: 203-51).

[22] Mrs Somerville had done the same when she had twice prevented her daughter Edith from entering into engagements with men “below” them. See Lewis (2005: 47-51).

[23] Dijkstra 1986: 25-26. On the nineteenth-century cult of women’s physical weakness, see Dijkstra 1986: 25-63.

[24] See Jaime de Pablos (2005: 51-53). Jaime de Pablos links Cecilia and Charlotte as examples of “mujeres-monstruos” (53), figures who deploy their energy and intelligence to rebel against a society that doubly discriminates them, first for being women, and second for not being women enough (that is, for not meeting standards of feminine beauty), and thus casts them as dangerous. On Moore’s representations of nuns, see Jaime de Pablos (2012).

[25] Jaime de Pablos (2000: 243) adds that Moore’s feminist views would have gone further had he presented a home managed and cared for equally by Alice and Dr Reed.

[26] Grubgeld underlines that “London functions as a compromise between art, as signified by Paris, and its lack, as signified by the west of Ireland” (2025: 144-45).

[27] In a curious coincidence, the year following the publication of The Real Charlotte, Celibates (1895) by Moore appeared. Both The Real Charlotte and the stories in Celibates explore the lives of unmarried individuals, marginalised as pitiable, eccentric, or even perverse in a Victorian society that upheld marriage and family as the normative life trajectory. Moore had a special interest in “people who did fall into the category of married-with-a-family heterosexuals” (Frazier 2012: 187).

[28] Significantly, the last scene Alice witnesses before leaving Ireland is an eviction, thus putting “the seal in Alice’s experiences in Ireland” (O’Toole 2013: 82). The eviction scene leaves no doubt that Ireland stands in an impossible situation.