Plagiarism: in the words of someone else… there’s little new in literature

A bitter, escalating row over plagiarism engulfed two French novelists last week. But artistic theft has been provoking anger, jealousy and insults since Roman times

When the French novelist Camille Laurens lost her son in childbirth in 1995, she responded with a moving account of her trauma, Philippe, which touched a nerve with her public. A few years later the infinitely more successful Marie Darrieussecq published a novel, Tom Est Mort, the story of a woman whose baby dies after a terrible birth agony. Laurens, in a fury, accused Darrieussecq of “psychological plagiarism”. Ever since, these two writers have been at each other’s throats, trading elevated Gallic insults, to the scandalised fascination of Paris.

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