cimorene

I've mentioned the lesbian Anglo-Irish suffragist writing and life partner duo Somerville & Ross earlier in the context of their authorship of the Irish R.M. novels, which were made into a television show in the 80s.

I just got done reading their novel The Real Charlotte (1894): I was intrigued by the fact that it's considered their masterpiece. Let me just include all the reviews from the current Wikipedia article's "reception and legacy" section, which are all individually fascinating and/or entrancing and completed my determination to read it:

Initial reviews were negative, with English critics bemoaning the use of the grotesque, disliking the antiheroine Charlotte, and bemoaning the lack of a happy ending. [Inspired use of 'bemoan' here in connection with normal features of literature that nowadays are only bemoaned by antis.]

Molly Keane wrote in 1987 (in her introduction to the Arrow edition of the book) that if the book had been written today it would "be almost a certainty for the Booker Prize, the American Book of the Month Choice, and most probably for the script of an important film travesty". She noted that "the book is a superb piece of architecture"[.] [...]

In 2000, Brian Fallon wrote in The Irish Times that The Real Charlotte "is generally agreed to be Somerville and Ross's masterpiece, and one of the half-dozen or so Irish novels which might justifiably be called great […] though the authors are somewhat snobbish and condescending towards Francie, the pretty young interloper from Dublin, she is real and touching even in her social gaucherie. The contrasting portrait of scheming Charlotte herself, a really bad woman, has a kind of Balzacian power."

In 2003, it was placed 32nd in "Novel Choice", a list of the top 50 Irish novels.

Scottish pianist and writer Susan Tomes in 2014 wrote that "I can hardly believe that such a fine book has fallen out of the public eye. […] The authors’ understanding of character and motive is remarkable, and their description of life in Ireland at the end of the 19th century is memorably vivid. Even better, the intricate plot closes slowly upon its characters like a giant pair of pincers."

In 2017, Anne Haverty wrote that "The Real Charlotte [may] be the best Irish novel, qua novel, of any century. As Anthony Cronin says, Ulysses, which might seem to qualify as “the best”, is a “fictive construction”, while The Real Charlotte is a powerful exemplar of the classic novel as it was, and sometimes still is, written." [...]

Malcolm Jones wrote in The Daily Beast that "The title character […] is such a terrible force of nature that she literally frightens another character to death. That hasn’t stopped me from urging people to make her acquaintance every chance I get."

I finished The Real Charlotte a couple of days ago at 4 am, unintentionally staying up an additional four hours reading it when I got near the end. Most of the novel is a comedy of manners of a type reminiscent of Jane Austen, featuring calls and visits back and forth in a rural Irish setting (county Galway), riding, chaperonage, poor relations, people taking offense, and brilliantly-drawn character portraits of a large cast. Like the Irish R.M. books though, and unlike Austen, the characters are drawn from all classes, and the servants of the central personages are all thoroughly shown to the reader.

As mentioned in the above quotes, the title character is an anti-heroine, and it's not really an exaggeration on the part of the reviewer who calls her a thoroughly bad person; and she heads a cast who are all flawed, and none of whom is wholly likeable, yet all of whom are sympathetic. I suppose just how sympathetic Charlotte is would be debatable, but she works just fine as a more-or-less point of view character for chunks of the book.

The rural small-town setting and its pocket-sized society of c. 1890 is enchantingly vivid and vividly enchanting, and figures as large as the settings do in the Irish R.M. series; the book showcases the authors' affection for the features and foibles of the culture and society, encyclopedically known, deeply understood and incisively observed, with caressing fondness and satirical charm sometimes simultaneously. The dialect is spelled phonetically, which is a technique I often find unreadable, but it flows smoothly and feels simply practical - the most efficient way to convey exactly what accent they're describing (and there's never any doubt in the reader's mind that the portrait is an accurate one).

In spite of the fact that the book is basically a comedy of manners, its underlying structure is that of a classic tragedy, as one might guess from Susan Tomes's quote above.

Here are a collection of quotes which delighted me from the text:

[I]t was altogether as inexpressive of everything, except bad taste, as was possible.

"If ye told that one a thing and locked the doore on her the way she couldn't tell it agin, she'd bawl it up the chimbley."

"[O]h, indeed, his conduck was not fit to tell to a jackass."

"[B]ut sure, if ye sent Bid Sal to look for salt wather in the say she wouldn't find it!"

He waited rather curiously to see whether Miss Fitzpatrick's problematic soul would here utter itself.

clothes to which even distance failed to lend enchantment,

[A]pprobation could not come from a source too low for him to be susceptible to it.

the grasshoppers whirring away in the grass, like fairy sewing-machines,

He had an agreeably craven habit of simulating enjoyment in the society of whoever fate threw him in contact with, not so much from a wish to please as from a politeness that had in it an unworthy fear of exciting displeasure;