The Spinster and the Prophet: H.G. Wells, Florence Deeks, and the Case of the Plagiarized Text
Books / Hardcover
Books › Biography & Autobiography › Literary
ISBN: 1568582366 / Publisher: Four Walls Eight Windows, August 2002
Traces feminist Florence Deek's efforts to fight her case of plagiarism against H.G. Wells after discovering that his publication, "The Outline of History," was similar to a transcript of hers that had been rejected by Well's publisher years earlier.
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In 1920, H. G. Wells published his best-selling The Outline of History. Several years earlier, Florence Deeks had sent a similar work to Wells’s North American publisher. Deeks’s The Web was a history of the world with an emphasis on the role that women played. Her book was rejected. Upon publication of Wells’s massive opus (1,324 pages), which he completed in 18 months, Deeks discovered similarities between the two texts. The books had matching structures, scope, and even contained identical factual errors. From accounts of their contrasting lives (Wells was a philanderer and social progressive, and Deeks was a feminist who never married), personal memoirs, and courtroom transcripts — where Deeks fought her case of plagiarism — McKillop weaves the story like a legal thriller. Over 25 photographs add to this forgotten chapter in literary history.
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