Sitting on "The Outer Skin" : Somerville and Ross's Through Connemara in a Governess Cart as a coded stratum of linguistic/feminist "Union" ideals

In her study of the West of Ireland and Irish identity, Catherine Nash notes the increasing pervasiveness of "the West" in popular travel accounts of Ireland throughout the boom years of the professional tourist industry during the 1880s and 1890s. The late Victorians' "growing taste for the primitive" fueled interest in the region, and the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century travel accounts of Connemara that Nash details are further seen to take part in a process of romanticization whereby the West became an almost barbaric but tantalizingly exotic "other" both within and without Ireland. This overt primordial gloss, however, becomes dynamically problematic when viewed within its discursive framework of travel-writing's British entrepreneurial imperialist values.