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Friday, August 12, 2005

YOU ROCK MY BOOK

Wow. Don’t rain but it pours. Via Maud Newton, here’s another fresh plagiarism tale, this one with a postmodern quirk: A woman’s autobiography takes much of its content from one contemporary novel, one contemporary short story collection, and three older novels. A writer in the Telegraph tells the tale:


I didn't more than glance over the original report in The Bookseller. It said that the Bloomsbury bestseller Rock Me Gently - Judith Kelly's memoir of a traumatic childhood in a Catholic orphanage - was being rewritten after "similarities" were spotted with Antonia White's 1933 novel Frost in May. Then a couple of weeks later Hilary Mantel, a novelist with whom I'm friendly, got in touch to say that she, too, had been gently rocked by Rock Me Gently.



After Mantel pointed out virtually verbatim copying to the book’s publisher, she received, notes the Telegraph writer, the following defense/threat:


“Judith… has read very widely and has a remarkable memory, and during the decade in which she was working on her own book, some of her wide-ranging reading emerged in her own prose without her realising it. There is no question of infringement of copyright," she wrote (that last steely, lawyerish phrase being the letter's real payload), "but Judith is naturally very upset that this has happened and is rewriting those passages for the next edition of the book."




Again with the uncontrollable memory! What shall we call this? Incontinent mnemonism?

Apparently Jane Eyre and Brighton Rock have been similarly pilfered for intimate truths about Judith Kelly.