"Hunters in red coats" : the Irish new girl in Edith Somerville's "Little Red Riding-Hood in Kerry" (1934)

In her 1920 essay on women and hunting, “Not the Woman’s Place,” Edith Somerville argued that sport “played quite as potent a part as education” in the emancipation of women: “The playing-field of Eton did not as surely win Waterloo as the hunting-fields and lawn-tennis grounds of the kingdom won the vote for women” (Somerville 1920, 230). Somerville here recognises the ways in which sport (especially hunting) in the late nineteen and early twenty centuries helped to create independent and empowered feminine identities that encouraged the broader campaign for women’s rights. Indeed, Erika Munkwitz demonstrates how riding manuals for women peaked and “coincided with the appearance of the ‘New Women’” figure in the fin-de-siecle British media (Munkwitz 2012, 81). This essay will explore Somerville’s use of traditional European fairy and folk tales for her own feminist purposes and, in the case of “Little Red Riding-Hood in Kerry” (1934), demonstrate how she revises a well-known tale to create a modern, equestrian Irish “New Girl” who exposes the economic exploitation of young women in early twenty-century Ireland.