Plagiarism, popularity and the dilemma of artistic worth : E. Œ. Somerville and Martin Ross’s Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. (1899)

This essay will focus on the unpublished legal papers relating to the 19th-century Irish women authors E. OE. Somerville (1858 – 1949) and Martin Ross (1862 – 1915) and their case of plagiarism against the authors of By the Brown Bog in 1913. The article will begin by summarising the ways in which the introduction of copyright law in Great Britain in 1709 altered aesthetic and legal definitions of authorship, and how this new conceptualisation of the author figure effectively disenfranchised collaborative modes of creativity and literary production. In so doing, the essay will investigate Somerville and Ross’s classification as popular, collaborative short story writers. The popularity of their Irish R.M. tales, it will be argued, harmed their case of plagiarism. The study will use a detailed analysis of Somerville and Ross’s legal correspondence to argue for the ways in which copyright law not only defined the ‘author’, but also the term ‘originality’, which was sorely affected by aesthetic and moral conceptions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ literature.