Early Life
Martin was born at Ross House in Connemara, County Galway, the youngest of sixteen children of James Martin of Ross (1804–1872). The Martin family, a branch of the Martyn family - one of the Tribes of Galway - had settled at Ross by the early 17th century, having previously inhabited the town of Galway for some three hundred years. Her father, James, was a Protestant, his grandfather having converted from the Catholic faith in order to retain the family estates under the Penal Laws. Nevertheless, each child of the family was secretly 'baptised' by the family servants, a practise James Martin winked at.
She was a kinswoman of Richard Martin (M.P.) and her contemporary, Edward Martyn, two other notable members of the Tribe. Her older brother, Robert Jasper Martin, was a noted songwriter and a well-regarded member of the Tory party in London. She shared a great-grandmother with the writer Maria Edgeworth, whose use of Irish vernacular speech she followed in her work.
Her father had managed to save both his estate and his tenants during the Famine - boasting that not one of his people died during the disaster - but at the cost of bankruptcy. Following his death in 1872, the family moved to Dublin and only returned to Ross in 1888 following revelations of financial fraud of the estate by their agent.
Read more about this topic: Violet Florence Martin
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“An early dew woos the half-opened flowers”
—Unknown. The Thousand and One Nights.
AWP. Anthology of World Poetry, An. Mark Van Doren, ed. (Rev. and enl. Ed., 1936)
“My life has been the poem I would have writ,
But I could not both live and utter it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)