As offspring of Dublin's Protestant middle class, both Wilde and Shaw found it perfectly natural to seek a career in London which was, after all, the metropolitan centre of culture in the English-speaking world Such a move was much less obvious for members of the Protestant aristocracy. England by the final decades of the nineteenth century, was a very changed place, heavily industrialized and filled with a new élite, whose social standing derived more from money than from land. Many leaders of English society were now openly hostile to aristocrats: and even those who admired people of caste were by no means certain that the occupants of draughty, decaying mansions in windswept Irish landscapes really counted as "top drawer".
Ever since the time of Jonathan Swift, there had been a pressure on the Anglo-Irish to throw in their lot with the natives. Faced with an uncomprehending monarch and parliament, Swift had urged his compatriots, by way of surly revenge, to burn everything English except coal Over the century and a half which followed, it became more and more clear that a strange reciprocity bound members of the ascendancy to those peasants with whom they shared the Irish predicament. Many decent landlords genuinely cared for their tenants and felt responsible for their fate: that care was often returned with a mixture of affection and awe. Others were negligent and some cruelly exploitative: but these attitudes served also to emphasize the kindness of the better sort. Ascendancy women, employing kitchen maids and domestic staff, often enjoyed rather developed relationships with a whole network of families in the wider community: they shared in the joy of christenings and weddings, the sadness at sickbeds and wakes. When the doom of the big houses was sealed by the Land Acts, Shaw was not the only commentator to wonder whether the lot of the landless labourer would prove happier under peasant proprietors than it had under paternalistic landlords. These fears were most often articulated by ascendancy women, among whom Edith Somerville, Violet Martin and Augusta Gregory were the outstanding literary figures.
It was the new economic pressure which compelled both Somerville and Martin to turn to art for a living which the big house could no longer provide but also for a fully comprehensive image of the crisis. Their profound Christian convictions led them to a tragic sense of the underlying injustice of their own privileged position, while their concern for family tradition led them to lament what seemed sadly like the end of the line. They preferred, however, to live out that process in Ireland than to seek refuge from it in an English villa. Perhaps at the back of minds well versed in fane Austen's Mansfield Park was a faint hope that, somehow or other, renewal might yet come from without.
Augusta Gregory, for her part, was one of the first Irish aristocrats to make the link between the Irish case and the wider challenge posed by the anti-colonial world. At first she sympathized with distant rebels in Egypt and India, only later to make the scandalized discovery that the troublemakers at her estate gates were hardly very different. That recognition led to her transformation from a colonial wife to an independent modern woman; and, in the course of that transformation, she emerged as a major artist.