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BOOK REVIEW

Anne Jamison. E. Œ. Somerville & Martin Ross: Female Authorship and Literary Collaboration. Cork: Cork University Press, 2016. 220pp. ISBN: 978-1-78205-192-3, £35.00 Hbk.

Reviewed by Annachiara Cozzi.

The literary partnership of the Anglo-Irish cousins Edith Œnone Somerville (1858-1949) and Martin Ross (pseudonym of Violet Martin, 1862-1915) has been increasingly acknowledged in recent contemporary criticism as one of the most remarkable collaborations of the late-nineteenth century. Over the last twenty years, Somerville and Ross have featured as key figures in the new wave of studies of female coauthorship, most importantly in Bette London’s Writing Double (1999), Holly Laird’s Women Coauthors (2000), Lorraine York’s Rethinking Women’s Collaborative Writing (2002) and Jill Ehnenn’s Women’s Literary Collaboration, Queerness, and Late-Victorian Culture (2008). These works, however, only utilize Somerville and Ross as a significant case study in the development of wide-ranging approaches to women’s collaborative life and work, and have often included them within an ahistorical grouping of other female collaborators. In her insightful and compelling study, Anne Jamison rightly laments that the overall effect of such attitudes “has been to disembody the duo’s collaborative practice from both its historical roots and the cultural politics of the texts that it engendered” (9). The aim of her volume is, therefore, to widen the privileged discourses within which Somerville and Ross’s partnership have been usually understood. In the first place, Jamison rethinks the duo’s collaboration beyond a purely feminist/sexual perspective.  Though by no means underrating or neglecting their emotive and sometimes homoerotic connection, Jamison looks at Somerville and Ross’s personal bond as inextricably intertwined with – and fertile ground for – their professional aspirations. In addition, her book argues that Somerville and Ross’s collaborative ethic challenged socially and culturally dominant post-Romantic conceptions of authorship, which defined the author as male, singular and inspired.

Jamison begins by exploring the aesthetic foundations of this rigid understanding of the author-figure. A good part of the introduction and the first chapter illustrate how, during the nineteenth century, collaborative authorship was repetitively posited as an inferior method of textual production, based on either a mechanical division of labor or the dominance of one of the partners, and as opposed to artistic vocation. This aesthetic hierarchy aligned joint authorship with craftsmanship, rather than with inspiration. Jamison describes metadiscourses on coauthorship by popular nineteenth-century writers, including Henry James, Andrew Lang, Walter Besant and James Brander Matthews (33-38), who all experimented with collaboration and whose comments contributed to debase it, claiming that it had no access to the realms of “the pure and lofty imagination” (Besant 204). Chapter 1 also shows how the Romantic ideal of singular and original authorship was endorsed in copyright law across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, thus further delegitimizing collaborative writing (Jamison 16-21). The literary collaboration of Wordsworth and Coleridge is presented as an early example to demonstrate how the philosophical and legal understanding of authorship complicated the practicalities of joint authorial practice (21-32), an example, in my opinion, not fully pertinent to the main discussion, as Wordsworth and Coleridge’s partnership was founded on very different premises from that of Somerville and Ross. In this historical framework, Somerville and Ross’s self-aware and committed collaborative ethic clearly occupies a defiant position within Victorian society and appears all the more revolutionary.

Chapter 2 redefines Somerville and Ross’s friendship as an integral part of their collaborative work, a friendship which had a significant practical import for their literary collaboration, but which has been too often trivialized into a “voyeuristic quest to determine the two women’s sexual orientation” (46). Validating her argument with Somerville’s 1946 essay “Two of a Trade” and the 1917 memoir Irish Memories (both written after Ross’s death), this chapter vindicates the crucial role friendship played in providing the emotional support and the intellectual stimulation necessary for the realization of the two women’s professional ambitions. The potential of female friendship is fictionalized in The Silver Fox (1897), erroneously identified by Jamison as the duo’s second or third novel before she corrects herself to note it was their fourth (54). Aside from this slip, Jamison’s in-depth examination of the novel highlights the social and political power of female ties in the colonial context of nineteenth-century Ireland (54-61). The last section of the chapter is dedicated to investigating the intertwined personal and professional partnership of Somerville and Ross through the analysis of their shared notebooks and their correspondence with each other. Due to continual practical disruptions, the two women were frequently forced to spend long periods apart. Their letters were not only the means for cementing affection when separated, they were also the site for the plotting and composition of their works, for mutual criticism and for casual accounts of real-life episodes that would often be utilized in their fiction (61-79). The duo’s joint creative practice, based on thorough discussion and multiple corrections of even the smallest detail, debunks traditional ideas of the solitary author.

The third chapter traces Somerville and Ross’s struggles with the material difficulties of the literary marketplace, from their dealings with editors and publishers – to this purpose, after a troubled initial period relying on their own circle of acquaintances, they finally hired one of the leading literary agents of the time, James B. Pinker – to their efforts to have their professional status recognized. Jamison ascribes the disregard for their professional status by their contemporaries to three main factors: their gender, their collaborative working practice, and the light-hearted, popular genres for which they largely became known. This “feeds back into the discourses which delegitimise authorship as both a professional and high aesthetic creative practice,” and female collaborators “appear to be doubly damned in this respect by virtue of their gender” (90). The chapter also narrates the failure of the accusations of plagiarism made by Somerville and Ross against the authors of a collection of comic short stories set in Ireland, By the Brown Bog, clearly modelled after Somerville and Ross’s Irish R.M. tales. The lack of support the two women found for their claims betrays the little respect those around them – including their agent – had for the originality and the artistic merit of their work.

Chapter 4, which takes into consideration Somerville and Ross’s early travel writing, is perhaps the least lucid in the study. Jamison argues for an impact of the duo’s collaborative perspective on their thinking about Ireland in their half-humorous, at-times-fictionalized travel narrative, Through Connemara in a Governess Cart (1893). Despite the restraints imposed by the demands of their editor for lightness, the two writers attempt to refashion both gender and colonial assumptions about the west of Ireland which circulated in coeval travel guides (exposed by Jamison in a digression within the chapter). Somerville and Ross’s position as both natives and tourists in Connemara, along with their Anglo-Irish identity, create a complex and sometimes ambiguous rhetoric on the Irish political situation. Filled with encounters with local people, the narrative accords special significance to three Irish women, both real and legendary, who come to debunk conventional ideas about Irish women as both temptation and threat to the male English traveller. However, though extremely promising and exciting, this chapter is at times difficult to follow as it lacks a clear and coherent thread of thought.

After Ross’s death in 1915, Somerville published another fourteen books under their popular dual signature, justifying this controversial practice by maintaining that their collaboration went on as before thanks to spiritualist communications. Predictably, critics have not taken seriously this latter half of the “collaboration,” which, as Jamison points out, has been “[m]arginalised to a private sphere of emotion” (132). In a lucid and intriguing discussion, chapter 5 delineates a fully contextualized narrative of Somerville’s spiritualist activities both before and after Ross’s death. Jamison makes it clear that Somerville’s post-Ross spiritualist practices were not “just the ravings of an agonised personal loss” (136). The chapter refers to Maurice Collis’s Somerville and Ross, a Biography (1968) for a full account of Somerville’s séances with Ross, thus avoiding unnecessary repetitions. Supporting her claims with Somerville’s diaries, notebooks, and automatic writing transcripts, Jamison highlights how Somerville’s daily occult interactions with her deceased collaborator closely resembled their communication via letters during Ross’s lifetime, ascribing this similitude to the surviving partner’s necessity to re-enact within herself “the identity-forming dialogue which was the sustenance for that self” (134). Jamison concludes the chapter agreeing with previous critics on the fact that Somerville’s post-Ross writings rarely reach the same level of aesthetic quality, not because Somerville had no talent on her own, but because “it was the combination of their talents which made for the creative brilliance of their work” (164). However, she does not discuss any of Somerville’s post-Ross fictional texts, which would have been a useful inclusion and would have provided more evidence for her assertions.

Overall, the book really does broaden our attention to this brilliant literary duo. Jamison’s arguments are generally well-supported by textual evidence, thanks to a wide inclusion of well-chosen passages from personal documents, like letters and diaries. One of the strong points of the volume is that it is not limited to one specific genre of writing. Though centered on the very peculiar collaboration between Somerville and Ross, the book greatly expands the reader’s knowledge also on both female authorship and literary collaboration – as promised in the subtitle. Late-Victorian literary marketplace and culture are well-explored as well. Jamison is very keen on contextualizing every new topic she introduces: her study presents plenty of digressions on various themes (to mention but a few, copyright law, Wordsworth and Coleridge’s partnership, women’s letter-writing). Some nineteenth-century scholars will find some digressions unnecessary and a bit taxing. In addition, it must be noted that the volume presents some little inaccuracies, as the one noted above, which may be confusing for those not well-acquainted with Somerville and Ross’s works.

Nonetheless, apart from these minor issues, Jamison definitely achieves the goals she set for her book at the beginning. Well-framed within previous critical works on women’s collaborations, E. Œ. Somerville and Martin Ross brings about valuable results, among which the most important is, perhaps, demonstrating that Somerville and Ross’s collaborative authorship is central to any understanding of their lives and writings. I found myself an engaged reader of Jamison’s explorations. Those interested in women’s writing, or simply in Victorian literature and culture, will find the same.

Annachiara Cozzi is a PhD. candidate in English Literature at the University of Pavia. Her research focuses on Victorian and early twentieth century literary collaborations, in particular popular coauthored novels written by both men’s and women’s partnerships.

Works Cited

Besant, Walter. “On Literary Collaboration.” The New Review, vol. 6, no. 33, 1892, pp. 200-09.

Collis, Maurice. Somerville and Ross, a Biography. Faber, 1968.

Ehnenn, Jill. Women’s Literary Collaboration, Queerness, and Late-Victorian Culture. Ashgate Publishing, 2008.

Laird, Holly. Women Coauthors. U of Illinois P, 2000.

London, Bette. Writing Double. Women’s Literary Partnerships.  Cornell UP, 1999.

York, Lorraine. Rethinking Women’s Collaborative Writing. U of Toronto P, 2002.