I just finished the book I mentioned earlier about H. G. Wells and the possibility of his cribbing much of his "Outline of History" from a manuscript by a woman from Canada. Good book, for all that it took me three weeks to read it. Well, I went on vacation, read another book or two, and generally doing the usual stuff.
Anyway, the name of the book is "The Spinster and the Prophet", and it was written by A. B. McKillop. The description of the legal case Florence Deeks, the Canadian woman in question, brought against H. G. Wells and the Macmillan Company bogs the book down a bit in the middle. Other than that a good book that makes a decent case for the plagarism, even though every court Deeks took the case to ruled against her. Well, it was the 1930 by the time the case came to trial, and attitudes toward women weren't exactly enlightened. In fact, only two years earlier the Supreme Court of Canada had declared that women did not legally exist as "persons"; this ruling was reversed the following year, but you get the idea of how women were looked at then. The bulk of the case put on by the defendants was that Deeks was an old, obssessed spinster who didn't have any business writing history anyway (although if I read the book correctly, she had more formal training in history than Wells had). Wells apparently never actually denied that he used her work, but Deeks's case was crippled by the fact that most of her evidence (she had three top historians testify for her as expert witnesses) turned on internal comparisons of her work and Wells's; the rest of her evidence was circumstantial at best. Still, the author of this book makes a good case that the plagarism did in fact take place.
I also recently finished reading "Dante's Equation", by Jane Jensen. Good book; I've posted a review over on the Reviews board, if anyone is interested.
So, I'm not actually currently reading anything. But I've got several books waiting in the wings, and I've just got to decide which one to begin next. Decisions, decisions.
