ABSTRACT
In her late-life collection of autobiographical essays, Happy Days (1946), Irish author Edith Somerville asserts that in Ireland “there is still a vein of primitive sorcery, and one can there meet with an acceptance of marvels that has not yet faded away” (10). “Eire,” she claims, “has not yet outgrown Fairies and Wise Women, and Wart-Charmers” (10). These assertions about Ireland, however, are not configured within the usual rhetoric of colonial superiority over assumed native Irish primitivism, but rather framed as nostalgic laments for a lost “[s]ensitiveness” in the powers of human perception (9). Despite Ireland’s continuing penchant for the marvelous, Somerville regrets that “Evolution” and the corresponding forces of “Civilization” have “deafened and dumbed us” so that “we can no longer hear and respond to the secret voices that … carry through forests and pass over deserts and rivers” (9). According to the essay, this extra-sensory perception now only exists among animals and oriental savages (Africans and Indians) and Somerville poses the question of whether or not “our telephones and wireless” are any “compensation” for this lost fifth sense (9).
