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Book Reviews H. G. Wells & Plagiarism A. B. McKillop. The Spinster and the Prophet: H. G. Wells, Florence Deeks, and the Case of the Plagiarized Text. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002. xvi + 477 pp. $26.95 MANY OF WELLS'S FRIENDS initially felt more than surprise when his two-volume Outline of History appeared in 1920. In a letter to Catherine Wells, Arnold Bennett spoke of being "staggered" by the work. "How the fellow did the book in the time fair passes me," Bennett confessed, "I cannot get over it. It's a life's work." There was cause for such amazement by Bennett and so many others. Wells, in fact, wrote most of this immensely successful tome of over 400,000 words (1,324 American-edition pages) in a mere six months during 1919. Recent scholars have been content to point to Wells's prior record of prodigious productivity as ample reason not to look deeper into this astonishing feat. Some have also pointed to Wells's prior experience in writing textbooks and, on this particular occasion, to his reliance on collaborators . Moreover, scholars have typically taken Wells at his word when in a mid-1919 interview he reported having researched and drafted the project during the prior eighteen months—that is at the start of 1918, when he was actually composing The Undying Fire. But circumstantial evidence supports a different account. Wells's correspondence during 1918 suggests that he had accomplished little, if any, research for The Outline. There was nothing, not even an outline, that he could offer when he vaguely pitched the proposed book to George Brett, board-of-directors president of Macmillan in New York, where the American edition would eventually be published. And his team of six collaborators did not in fact write portions of The Outline, but only read over and revised errors in certain selections that he sent them during 1919. Wells later spoke of their role as "vetting." Moreover, the first sign of a typescript for The Outline appears in February of 1919; twenty days later Wells had doubled that document to reach a phenomenal total of 125,000 words. By August, the first five perfected chapters were posted for serial publication, which commenced in November. In a matter of 296 BOOK REVIEWS months and with no training in history, Wells somehow produced a work that, as Bennett aptly notes, reads like "a life's work." The mystery deepened in 1927, when an unpublished Toronto author, Florence Deeks, served writs charging Wells and representatives of both North American branches of Macmillan with literary piracy. Deeks, who once had taught history at Presbyterian Ladies' College, had labored full-time for four years on a project entitled "The Web of the World's Romance ." Under the pseudonym Adul Weaver, she had submitted her manuscript, already twice rejected elsewhere, to the Canadian branch of Macmillan, where it remained from July 1918 to April 1919. When she retrieved her document from the publisher, it was, in her words, "soiled, thumbed, worn and torn, with over a dozen pages turned down at the corners, and many others creased as if having been bent back in use." Just how her manuscript got into this shape became evident to Deeks after reading Wells's Outline, which was written precisely while her manuscript was on submission at Macmillan. Both works not only shared the same scheme of development and identical related themes, but even identical mistakes, both factual errors and omissions she had come to recognize in her own work before reading Wells's text. Deeks spent all of 1921 documenting similarities, including entire paragraphs and sentences modified, she believed, only by Wells's winning style. Deeks's evidence was sufficient to convince the leading litigator of Canada's Law Society to undertake her case as early as 1925, when he announced his intention to sue Wells and his publishers. Litigation is rarely, if ever, a satisfying process, and Deeks saw little result. Her attempted suit did, however, worry people associated with Wells. Brett in New York and the new board president of Macmillan in Canada, as their communications show, were very concerned about what unscrupulous previous...

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