tragic heroines and wise women in the novels of somerville and ross

The novels of Somerville and Ross depict, behind their wit and social satire, a darker tragic vision in which class and gender overdetermine the outcomes often awaiting female characters. Even the heroines of relatively privileged background are vulnerable to change and insecurity. In The Real Charlotte the eponymous heroine’s intelligence and determination fail to guard her against the predicament of the ‘unmarriageable’ woman in the society of the period. Her strength of character, her capacity to foresee and influence events (like the archaic Irish or Greek Wise Woman figure) turn to despair and damage to others. In The Silver Fox the outcomes are happier for the two heroines through the agency of another pre-Olympian tragic Wise Woman, herself the victim of tragic fate. In Sarah’s Youth, a notable example of Modernism in Irish writing, the Wise Woman figures are the heroine’s half-sister, and an older mentor-figure. Tragedy, engendered in the conflictual social-family nexus, is averted through the agency of foreknowledge, and a certain relative modernisation of society’s attitudes to (economically  independent) women.