When I was younger, I used to hope to write a serious novel one day. Of course like most aspiring writers I loved the classics like Jane Austen, whose plots were “marriage plots”. However I also read other “not quite classics” and novels which were about marriage and “normal life” rather than the approach to marriage, which was the plot used mostly by Jane Austen and other woman novelists such as Fanny Burney.
One of my favourites as a girl was The Real Charlotte, by the Irish authors Edith Somerville and Violet Martin who wrote as Somerville and Ross. They were 2 upper class Irish women, cousins, who formed a close friendship in girlhood and began to write novels together.
It is quite a scandalous novel, although there is nothing explicit about it, it is clearly “about” sex and passion. Charlotte Mullen is a plain woman of the Irish middle class, the daughter of an estate manager (agent). Because of her position, she socialises with the upper class landed gentry, but part of her lineage is “Irish peasant”, and she is eager to emphasis the “good” side of her heritage rather than the half that springs from the Irish peasantry.
She is a very plain woman, of middle age, and has never been attractive to men. So when she inherits a small property, and takes a cousin from Dublin to live with her, fireworks erupt. Her cousin, Francie Fitzpatrick is dazzlingly pretty and sexual, and she attracts men easily. Francie is from an even poorer background than Charlotte, and has been living with some middle class cousins in Dublin, with only a tiny income. She is foolish and flirtatious and wilful, and has no ideas of the refinements and etiquette practised by the upper class in the country.
Charlotte is jealous of her younger relative’s beauty and charm and her easy happy go lucky ways, when she herself has had to fight and use her sharp intelligence to maintain her place in society. But she has hopes that she can marry Francie off to one of the well to do gentry and achieve more social connections and prominence that way. But while Francie finds many men who are attracted to her, the social circle find her stupid, vulgar and far too fond of men, and when Christopher Dysart, the local grandee, falls in love with her, his family are not happy and it is clear that she wouldn’t be welcomed by them. Besides, Francie has an unfortunate knack of also attracting and flirting with men who are not as suitable as husbands.
Charlotte can see her plans going wrong and her temper gets worse. She becomes increasingly jealous of Francie, and the two women find they cannot live together.
Francie also engages in a flirtation with the man that Charlotte has always loved, Roddy Lambert, the agent for the Dysart estate. Lambert has been friendly with Charlotte, but he has never returned her feelings. He made use of her infatuation at times, but he married a richer woman, for her money. Bored with his wife, he begins to flirt with Francie, who encourages him Charlotte is increasingly angry and miserable; she is a hard and selfish woman but her need for love and for sex is not being met and she is not the woman to be passive under this.
But Francie’s heart is already given to Hawkins, a young officer, who is selfish and vulgar and crass, who encourages her affection but is unwilling to marry a girl with no money. All this creates a combustible situation where the participants collide and tragedy ensues.
I hope people reading this won’t rely on my brief summary but will read the book. I loved it, the beautiful prose, the characters, and the clever delineation of love and sexuality within the bounds of Victoria propriety. I had studied the Anglo Irish gentry, at college and read a lot of their literature, and got a feeling for the society, from these novels. This was very useful to me in creating Darcy Brookfield, the young Anglo Irish man who is the hero of Fashionable Flirt.
