“As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism!” opined Mark Twain more than 100 years ago. “The kernel, the soul – let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances – is plagiarism.”
Twain was writing to his friend, the deafblind author Helen Keller, after reading her autobiography, in which she recounted her own experiences of being accused of – and admitting to – plagiarism. When she was 12, Keller wrote a short story called The Frost King. It was published and, as Keller recounts, “this was the pinnacle of my happiness” – until she was “dashed to earth” when the similarities between her story and Margaret T Canby’s The Frost Fairies emerged. “The two stories were so much alike in thought and language that it was evident Miss Canby’s story had been read to me, and that mine was a plagiarism,” wrote Keller. She was subjected as a child to a formal investigation at the Perkins Institution for the Blind over whether or not she had plagiarised deliberately. It acquitted her; although she admitted she must have read Canby’s story, she could remember nothing of it.
“I have ever since been tortured by the fear that what I write is not my own.” she wrote. “It is certain that I cannot always distinguish my own thoughts from those I read, because what I read becomes the very substance and texture of my mind … My compositions are made up of crude notions of my own, inlaid with the brighter thoughts and riper opinions of the authors I have read.”
Or, as Nicola Solomon at the Society of Authors puts it, “fiction writers are magpies”. This month alone, we have seen the New York Times note the “striking” similarities between AJ Finn’s bestselling mystery The Woman in the Window and a self-published novel released two years before, a romance writer who blamed her ghostwriter for copying passages from other writers’ books, and Australian author Nick Milligan pointing out the common features in his novel Enormity and Danny Boyle’s forthcoming film Yesterday.
In 2006, Ian McEwan was forced to defend himself from claims he had plagiarised the work of Lucilla Andrews’ autobiography in his novel Atonement. In 2007, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh failed to prove that Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code copied their earlier non-fiction work The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. And last summer, a judge dismissed a lawsuit from Emma Cline’s ex-boyfriend, who alleged her debut novel The Girls infringed his copyright.
Solomon says the Society is often contacted by authors complaining that another has pilfered an idea. “Some cases are absolutely straightforward, but legal action is very tricky in cases which don’t concern actual language copying but rely on copying of themes, plots or structure. They’re expensive to take, they depend on line-by-line checking of work and unfortunately many authors don’t have the funds to go against large publishing or film companies to take action with no guarantee of success.”
It has long been claimed that there are somewhere between three and 36 basic plots in all forms of storytelling. Three years ago, academics fed nearly 2,000 stories into a computer analysis and concluded that there were six “core trajectories” for all stories. None of these common plots, however, include a character called Jack who passes off the Beatles’ music as his own on another planet (Milligan’s Enormity and Boyle’s new film), or an alcoholic, agoraphobic woman who watches a crime play out in the house opposite her own (Finn’s bestseller and British author Sarah A Denzil’s Saving April).
Milligan told Guardian Australia last week that he felt the similarities were “probably just a horrible coincidence and they mean me no disrespect”. As for Finn and Denzil, the similarities came to light this month after the New Yorker ran an exposé about Finn, a pseudonym for the publisher Dan Mallory, who has a history of lying about his professional history and health, including a brain cancer diagnosis.
Finn’s thriller was published in January 2018; Denzil’s novel was self-published in March 2016. Reviews on Amazon and Goodreads have pointed out the similarities between the two books for months. “Almost the same thing” says one Goodreads reviewer on Saving April. “Seems so similar to Girl in the Window. Feels like I just read a different version of that,” runs an Amazon review of Denzil’s book.
The New York Times recently noted the parallels between the two being “numerous, and detailed”. And they are (spoilers ahead): both centre on a woman who has lost a child and partner through a car accident for which she blames herself, a fact that isn’t at first revealed. Both feature a new family moving in opposite, whom the agoraphobe watches. She becomes convinced the husband is abusing the wife and befriends their adopted teenager who, after gaining her trust, turns out to be the villain.
Denzil, real name Sarah Dalton, told the Guardian she had noticed the similarities herself when she read The Woman in the Window. She said she started writing Saving April in October 2015, submitting it to Amazon’s Kindle Scout programme, which displayed a sample of text from the novel, the blurb and the cover on its website in December 2015. It went on to Amazon as a pre-order and was published on 29 March 2016.
The New Yorker profile identified another work similar to The Woman in the Window: the 1995 film Copycat, starring Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter. The film and the novel both see a psychologist become trapped in her home by agoraphobia, drink too much, be mistrusted by the police and join a forum that turns out to be dangerous. The director of Copycat, Jon Amiel, told the New Yorker that the debt was “not actionable, but certainly worth noting, and one would have hoped that the author might have noted it himself”.
Mallory himself has been open about being inspired by other works, including Gillian Flynn, Kate Atkinson and the Hitchcock film Rear Window, which he says he had just finished watching when the idea came to him. But both Mallory’s literary agent and his publisher have said that the outline of The Woman in the Window, including characters and main plot points, was fully formed by 20 September 2015, before Saving April was released. Mallory submitted a 7,500 word outline that day – a month before Denzil began writing her novel.
When the New York Times published its story about Saving April, Mallory’s lawyer allowed a Times reporter to look at the outlines the author sent to his agent on 20 September and 4 October. “Some of the overlapping plot points, including the fact that both protagonists were fighting with their husbands about infidelity before the car crashes, and that the psychopathic teenager tortured animals, while not in the original outline, were contained in the October version … Mr Mallory’s attorney said Mr Mallory has never read Saving April,” said the paper, in an addition to its original story.
Solomon said: “It’s bound to happen to an extent, but sometimes things go over the line.” She won’t comment on particular cases, but advises all writers to document every source and submission of their work from the earliest stage possible.
“That can help if you want to take action but also protects authors when it is alleged that they have copied others. It also protects you from inadvertently copying an idea by forgetting that you picked it up elsewhere and thinking it was original to you,” she adds. “Much copying is unconscious – though that is no defence.”
TS Eliot had it that “immature poets imitate; mature poets steal” – a line once echoed by Mallory. “It is often said that ‘good writers borrow, great writers steal’,” he told the Observer in 2018. “If I had not read the work of Flynn or Atkinson I wouldn’t have written the book I did.”
Or, as Twain put it in his letter to Keller: “substantially all ideas are second-hand”.