Violet Martin

Violet Florence Martin (11 June 1862 – 21 December 1915) was an Irish author who co-wrote a series of novels with cousin Edith Somerville under the pen name of Martin Ross in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Martin was born at Ross House in Connemara, County Galway, the youngest of sixteen children of James Martin of Ross (1804–1872). The Martin family, a branch of the Martyn family - one of the Tribes of Galway - had settled at Ross by the early seventeenth century, having previously inhabited the town of Galway for some three hundred years. Her father, James, was a Protestant, his grandfather having converted from the Catholic faith in order to retain the family estates under the Penal Laws. Nevertheless, each child of the family was secretly 'baptised' by the family servants, a practice James Martin winked at.

She was a kinswoman of Richard Martin and her contemporary, Edward Martyn, two other notable members of the tribe. Her older brother, Robert Jasper Martin, was a noted songwriter and a well-regarded member of the Tory party in London. She shared a great-grandmother with the writer Maria Edgeworth, whose use of Irish vernacular speech she followed in her work.

Her father had managed to save both his estate and his tenants during the Great Famine - boasting that not one of his people died during the disaster - but at the cost of bankruptcy. Following his death in 1872, the family moved to Dublin and only returned to Ross in 1888 following revelations of financial fraud of the estate by their agent.

Violet Martin and Edith Somerville were second cousins. They originally met on 17 January 1886 at Castletownshend, after which they became lifelong companions and literary partners. They came to share a home in Drishane, County Cork. In 1889, Violet adopted the pseudonym Martin Ross, which comprised her surname and the name of her ancestral home; thus the authors were called Somerville and Ross. Their works included The Real Charlotte (1889), Some Reminiscences of an Irish R.M. and In The Vine Country.

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