Start Date
28-5-2024 2:45 PM
End Date
28-5-2024 3:00 PM
Description
The historical role of Bordeaux and the consumption of claret throughout Georgian and Victorian Ireland has been explored. That fine red wines were drunk and enjoyed by the ascendancy in Ireland is not unusual. What is unusual, however, is the place of In the Vine Country,a Somerville-and-Ross travelogue commissioned and written for the Lady’s Pictorial: A Newspaper for the Home, an illustrated weekly paper founded in 1880, aimed at middle-class women in Victorian era Great Britain and Ireland. From Castletownshend, Co. Cork and Oughterard, Co. Galway, cousins Edith Œ. Somerville (1858-1949), and Violet Martin (1862-1915) were writing partners. Of the Anglo-Irish protestant class, they hold an ambivalent place in the Irish literary canon; as identity politics and “othering” are among factors at play in their becoming lost and disregarded voices. Their commissioning editor dispatched them to the vineyards of the Médoc to document the vintage of 1891; In the Vine Country is the collection of their illustrated weekly articles published from October to December 1892. Wine holds deep symbolism (then and now) and has been used as a means of establishing status and making social distinctions. The role of fine red wine in In the Vine Country is symbolic of this period of upheaval and social change in colonial Ireland, and of the changing roles of middle-class women. This paper draws on the subtle and overt tensions of two single Irish women travelling alone from West Cork to the Médoc in the late 1800s. Both trauma and tradition are explored through the lenses of women and wine consumption; changing gender politics; and the “othering” of both wine as a distinct beverage and the protestant classes in Catholic Ireland. The question of whether Irish women in the ascendancy may have had more social freedoms than their English counterparts of the period becomes apparent.
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DOI
https://doi.org/10.21427/617q-kz89
Reclaiming Lost and Disregarded Voices: In the Vine Country, Memory, Female Independence and Wine Writing in the Victorian Age
The historical role of Bordeaux and the consumption of claret throughout Georgian and Victorian Ireland has been explored. That fine red wines were drunk and enjoyed by the ascendancy in Ireland is not unusual. What is unusual, however, is the place of In the Vine Country,a Somerville-and-Ross travelogue commissioned and written for the Lady’s Pictorial: A Newspaper for the Home, an illustrated weekly paper founded in 1880, aimed at middle-class women in Victorian era Great Britain and Ireland. From Castletownshend, Co. Cork and Oughterard, Co. Galway, cousins Edith Œ. Somerville (1858-1949), and Violet Martin (1862-1915) were writing partners. Of the Anglo-Irish protestant class, they hold an ambivalent place in the Irish literary canon; as identity politics and “othering” are among factors at play in their becoming lost and disregarded voices. Their commissioning editor dispatched them to the vineyards of the Médoc to document the vintage of 1891; In the Vine Country is the collection of their illustrated weekly articles published from October to December 1892. Wine holds deep symbolism (then and now) and has been used as a means of establishing status and making social distinctions. The role of fine red wine in In the Vine Country is symbolic of this period of upheaval and social change in colonial Ireland, and of the changing roles of middle-class women. This paper draws on the subtle and overt tensions of two single Irish women travelling alone from West Cork to the Médoc in the late 1800s. Both trauma and tradition are explored through the lenses of women and wine consumption; changing gender politics; and the “othering” of both wine as a distinct beverage and the protestant classes in Catholic Ireland. The question of whether Irish women in the ascendancy may have had more social freedoms than their English counterparts of the period becomes apparent.