The Real Charlotte

The Real Charlotte is the masterpiece of Somerville and Ross (the pen names of Edith Somerville and her second cousin, Violet Martin) in which our antiheroine reveals her terrible nature when her marriage plans for her orphaned and beautiful cousin, Francie, go badly wrong. Insanity, sexual jealousy and a decaying Anglo-Irish country estate: the novel has them all. Truly creepy classic.

For some critics, The Real Charlotte is the best Irish novel of the nineteenth century. The novel had a less auspicious critical beginning becaue some English popular magazines were disturbed by the novel’s use of the grotesque. They disliked the powerful and conniving heroine of the text, Charlotte Mullen. They could not understand why her pretty, younger cousin, Francie Fitzpatrick, did not marry the hero in the end of it all but, instead, was killed off with startling and horrifying abruptness. The novel subverts romantic conventions and details the bleak conditions of the Irish landscape with grim humour.