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.