At Christmas time in 1920, Florence Deeks of Toronto, was reading a book review in Saturday Night magazine. The book being reviewed was “The Outline of History” by the renowned H G Wells. Deeks became quite rattled because the book sounded very much like the manuscript she had delivered to MacMillan Canada for publishing. Deeks purchased the 2 volume set and the more she read, she became increasingly convinced that Wells had plagiarized the outline, some of the phrases and the context of her manuscript which she had called “The Web”. Deeks had set out to detail the history of the world but with a feminist perspective as women’s roles were entirely absent from history books.

Florence, her three sisters and their widowed mother live in a comfortable house in Toronto. Her brother, George Deeks, a wealthy industrialist was able to provide finances for Florence to pursue her case against Wells. She paid for professional and expert opinions on history and literature in order to determine if Wells had access to and used her manuscript as the foundation for his book.

This story is really interesting because of the research into the lives of Deeks but more particularly, HG Wells who was very popular at the time for his science fiction and fiction works. The Author provides a biography of Wells and his wife Catherine, who stands by her man regardless of his womanizing. He is portrayed as a self indulgent, opinionated, sexist, unpleasant narcissist with a habit of pursuing women who might be more interesting than his wife.
Deeks is relentless in her search for the truth as to what happened with her manuscript. She pursues Wells through the Ontario court system, appeals the ruling in Wells’ favour and then appeals her case with the British Privy Council. She loses every time as her lawyers are never able to prove how her manuscript was transported across the Atlantic and .ended up in Wells’ hands. McKillop provides a believable scenario at the end while empathizing with and admiring Deeks fortitude and resolve against the publishing industry, the justice system and men like Wells. ( )

Themes: intellectual rights, gender roles, marriage, women's rights, suffrage, sexism, free love, Canadian history, publishing, fame
Setting: Toronto and London, early 20th century

I picked this up because of the title, but I brought it home because I had just finished The War of the Worlds. The book is about an obscure female writer, Florence Deeks, who accused H G Wells of plagiarizing large portions of his World History book from her unpublished manuscript. The writer starts by profiling each party in the lawsuit, first Wells, then Deeks, then back to Wells for a bit, and so on. I certainly learned much that I had never heard before about Wells. I was really only familiar with his science fiction writing, although I had heard the titles of another book or two. But I had no idea what a ladies' man he was. He was a fervent advocate of free love and Fabianism, had at least one illegitimate child, and made his wife extremely unhappy by the way he couldn't stay away from other women. The worst part was the way that he wrote books about his affairs, only halfway hiding their identities, and then published them for the whole world to read. His regular publisher even had to refuse a couple of books as too racy to handle, thinking more of lawsuits and poor taste that actual content.

So what's the verdict? Did he steal her work? Well, sadly, that's where this book got boring. I really didn't care about the state of Canadian publishing at the time, the characters involved, or long passages comparing sections sentence by sentence. I also especially didn't care about the court cases. I just wanted a summary of that, and more of the personalities involved. It was interesting to learn about Canada at the time, but get on with the verdict! The court decided in favor of the man, naturally, but the writer and the reader will probably disagree.

If you are a fan of Wells, I think you might enjoy at least looking through this one. Otherwise, I would stay away. It was somewhat interesting, but would have been much better if the focus had stayed on the people and not strayed so far into details. 2.5 stars. ( )

I am not a big science fiction fan, so H.G. Wells, while I certainly read him and was socially aware of him, was not an author for whom I had any great affinity. But it was nevertheless disappointing to realize that he was a completely unlikeable, self-absorbed, trivial, priapic worm. Add to it that he may well have been a plagiarist who stole words knowing the person whose words he stole would likely have no recourse because she was not famous, had little money of her own, and most importantly, because she was a she and not a he, and it would appear H.G. Wells was a vile little man in many respects. Read my entire review here: http://ireadeverything.com/the-spinster-and-the-prophet-by-a-b-mckillop/ ( )

Florence Deeks spent years writing a history of the world focused on women’s role. H.G. Wells spent a couple of months writing a history of the world; when he wrote about women, it was disparagingly, which was of a piece with his treatment of them in real life. How did Wells manage to write a best-seller of several hundred thousand words, never having written history before, in such a short time that he had to have averaged thousands of words a day? Well, McKillop makes a good circumstantial case that he leaned heavily on Deeks’s unpublished manuscript, which she’d sent to Wells’s Canadian publishers, who hung on to it for a really long time before rejecting it and returned it to her dogeared and dirty. Deeks spent years and perhaps a hundred thousand dollars on her ultimately futile lawsuit—futile because she was a spinster and he was a well-respected author, as well as futile because the similarities were very much in idea rather than expression, and only copying expression can lead to legal liability. But it was clear throughout that narratives of hysterical women were more important than what actually happened to that manuscript. As a copyright minimalist, I found myself unwilling to call what Wells did infringement, but I’d join in the plagiarism conclusion. ( )

Interesting story, but McKillop is somewhat long-winded, and seems to make a great many inferences. Assumes a lot about Wells, Wells' wife and Florence Deeks. ( )