These literary cousins - Edith OEnone Somerville and Violet Martin ("Martin Ross") - were friends and close collaborators on their stories. Violet Martin was called "Ross" because that was the name of her first home in Co. Galway. Violet died in 1915; Edith Somerville lived on until 1949, maintaining a vigorous literary output to the end. Somerville and Ross are buried close together in Castletownshend's little churchyard - a cross for Ross, a plain stone for Somerville marking their graves. These Victorian ladies wrote a collection of funny stories of Irish life, primarily, living most of their lives at Castletownshend, Skibbereen, Co. Cork. Castletownshend, a sleepy little old-world village on the shore of Cast Haven on the southern coast, had an air of quiet reserve; a sense of walled gardens and tennis courts, and yachts sheltering in the harbour. Castletownshend was unusual for an Irish town of the time; instead of containing just one big house it contained at ! least three: Drishane, home of the Somervilles; Glen Barrahane, the 19th century seat of the Coghills; and Castle Townshend where the Townshends lived. To make it even cosier, intermarriage during the 18th and 19th centuries meant they were all related to one another. It was, in short, a nest of cousins and landed gentry , a most civilized and homely place for growing families. Linking the houses together was Main Street and two sycamores near the bottom known locally as the Two Trees and accepted by all as the focal point of the village. Edith Somerville cleverly illustrated several of the books which tended to show both sides of Ireland - grave and gay, tragic and comic. Their writings recalled "the golden days when the old ways of life were unquestioned." This feudal order was to be broken down during the second half of the century and both Violet Martin and Edith Somerville always mourned it and their "light-hearted days." Behind their work runs a theme of a ra! ther idealized harmony between landlord and tenant. Generally, they kept to the Ireland they knew best, blending two landscapes, the Galway-Connemara of the Martins, and the rocky inlets of West Cork, Roaring Water Bay, and the relationship between aristocrat and peasant was often central to the fabric of their stories. Often photographed together in their lovely hats and dresses and with their dogs, Candy and Sheena, they had a working friendship that has no easy parallel in Irish literature - the three Bronte sisters, writing and pining together in their parsonage in Haworth, on the Yorkshire Moors, comes to mind, but the Bronte's eventually wrote separately. Certainly, the Brontes did not have an excessive delight in existence, a wild sense of humor, which was characteristic of the literary firm of Somerville and Ross. Their literary guide was Maria Edgeworth, a friend of their mutual great-grandfather, Charles Kendal Bushe, the Lord Chief Justice of Ireland. Excerpts, "Ireland of the Welcomes" July-August 1984