"The Spinster and the Prophet" by A.B. McKillop

In the 1920s, judges ridiculed a Canadian woman who said H.G. Wells plagiarized her book, but a modern scholar finds her case convincing.

By Jonathon Keats

Nov 7, 2002 | When H.G. Wells, world-renowned author, was charged by an unknown Canadian spinster with plagiarizing a book that purported to cover all that had happened to mankind since the beginning of time, he didn't take her claims especially seriously. He preferred, on the contrary, to poke fun at the 60-year-old woman for "conceiv[ing] the strange idea that she held the copyright to human history."

If, on the surface, his dilemma bears a resemblance to that of rogue historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, in another respect the court case against him seems strongly to anticipate such tussles as the lawsuit, recently dismissed, against J.K. Rowling disputing her claim to have created Harry Potter. All of which is to say that the litigation that challenged Wells' reputation some eight decades ago vividly evokes, and may even explain, the reasons for our confusion about plagiarism to this day.

The incident was almost forgotten -- another episode in Wells' overloaded biography -- until a Carleton University professor named A.B. McKillop expertly resurrected it in his absorbing account, "The Spinster and the Prophet," a new book that, whether by design or accidentally, couldn't be more timely. The motivations of Wells and his nemesis, Miss Florence Deeks of Toronto, as well as the behavior of any number of publishers and lawyers, are pieced together in McKillop's deeply researched story. Is Wells guilty? We must first consider what we mean by the question. And we can do that only by examining the contested facts.

The book that Florence Deeks claimed was based on her own was titled "The Outline of History," and its true origin will forever remain a mystery. It was mired in controversy from the moment it was published in 1920. One respected critic called it "a great book -- one of the greatest of all time!" while a prominent scholar held it to be "commonplace in the extreme." It shortly became a bestseller and made Wells a fortune, in England and America alone earning him 25 percent royalties on more than 2 million copies over its first few years in print.

The book displayed all the virtues and vices of the man whose name graced its covers. Necessarily general, it provided an overview of the universe from the formation of the solar system through World War I, serving as a sort of Cliff's Notes version of the past 4.5 billion years, as well as an argument for a future world democracy in which there'd be neither poverty nor war.

For the perspective it provided, "Outline" was an extraordinary accomplishment, yet what it left out was more than a little significant. Tamerlane never made the cut, nor did -- ever the good socialist, Wells -- Adam Smith. Much of India's history was omitted, as well as that of Japan, and the United States vanished from his summary for the 50 years between the War of Independence and the birth of the Monroe Doctrine. The deepest flaw of all, though, was surely the omission of almost any mention of women.

If the discrepancy between lofty aims and shoddy execution was typically Wellsian, the sexism of his world history even more strongly reflected his personality. His affairs, too countless to mention, are notable chiefly for their similarity, or, rather, for his inability to differentiate between women: His interest was in novelty, and while he bedded some of the best minds of his day -- from Margaret Sanger to Rebecca West -- his fiction demonstrated even less knowledge of them than it did self-awareness. A man blind to the accomplishments of the women with whom he's intimate isn't likely to appreciate the significance of Queen Elizabeth or Joan of Arc or Hatshepsut, either.

Hatshepsut, a great Egyptian pharaoh, was in fact included in Wells' history, although under the odd spelling "Hatasu." As it happens, Florence Deeks too included "Hatasu" in the overview of world history she completed several years before Wells published his "Outline." That the female pharaoh was included was to be expected: Deeks wrote her book, "The Web of the World's Romance" to lend importance to women's role in the past, and to suggest that peace and prosperity were characteristic of female leadership.

Deeks was neither a professional scholar nor a published author. Inspired by feminist activists traveling through Canada at the start of the century, she'd simply seen it as common sense to seat herself in the reading room of the Toronto public library, and not to leave until she'd rewritten world history.

She worked straight through the Great War, wearing her overcoat when there was no power, going home each night to her widowed mother, her two sisters and her typewriter. "The Web" gerrymandered together facts from a number of popular histories and encyclopediae -- beginning with the formation of the solar system and continuing on through the war -- but leaned rather heavily on John Richard Green's "Short History of the English People." In fact, she'd borrowed from Green freely enough that it became a worry. Unsure whether her dependence amounted to outright plagiarism, she decided to bring the manuscript for vetting by Green's publisher, the venerable Macmillan & Co.

Next Page: Wells "wrote" a 1,324-page book in one year

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