Montgomery & Wiggin revisited, at last

[lady_schrapnell]

When I said I'd do a follow-up to my last post 'tomorrow', nobody took it too literally, right? Cause it was all written up in my head, and it was oh-so eloquent and fascinating and so on and so forth (yup - that's all gone)... and there would have been time to do it and still to write an astute and beautiful essay (spot the quote!). And then Older Daughter's mobile phone got stolen. That of course caused all kinds of running around - both figurative and not so - and time on hold to customer service, and eventually to about every Meteor shop in town to find a loaner one. Shot a big old hole in that day's essay writing. Next day's drama was the washer trying to set the house on fire. Yeah, that was fun. Much time was lost today to the attempt to clear the clutter out of the path between front door and kitchen. And more when the man attempting to un-install the old machine discovered that the 'idiots' - surprisingly left at 'idiots', without the usual accompanying swear-words - putting in the kitchen cupboards had buried plumbing and electrical access. And the new one was a bit bigger than the old, though they're all supposed to be standard, so there was more fun waiting to see whether it was going to fit. But eventually, all was sorted, and two loads of laundry/washing have been done in a very nice new machine. (At this point there is much more to be done, but nowhere to dry it.) I've also learned some fascinating facts about the energy ratings of washing machines - this gets an A+!

The essay is still suffering, as is much else, so there'll only be a question asked instead of the question and that eloquent elaboration of my response to the question that was in my head a few days ago.

Here's the question: would anyone buy the argument that L.M. Montgomery had plagiarized Kate Douglas Wiggin's Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm in writing Anne of Green Gables? steepholm said he'd expected me to have a nice little article out soon to that effect, but despite the quotes I posted last time, and the list of similar incidents, characterizations and more (and that was a very partial list) of the post before that, I wouldn't buy it for a second. I'd be interested to hear opinions on either side.

Comments

[breathingbooks.livejournal.com]

I don't think that LMM plagarized Wiggins, but my world wouldn't shatter if she had. Even if she did, well, er, Anne really is loads better than Rebecca, and, er... artistic license?

But no, I don't think she did.

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

I'm glad your world is sensibly unshatterable in this matter. :) I'd be really quite upset, I think. Though it's a hypothetical point, obviously. But Montgomery is in my category of people I believe to be (have been) truly decent, if no more unmixedly so than any of us, and that kind of quiet dishonesty wouldn't fit in easily with the moral values she herself professed.

And artistic licence is another big question, isn't it? The borrowing would be more in the Opal Mehta line than just a bit of intertextuality or reworking an idea, but I'm now wondering when the idea of plagiarism as a Bad Thing really came in? Unabashed plagiarism was going on all the time in children's lit in the early 1800s, apparently. (I have learned something from this module apparently, though it's not apparent in the essay yet!)

Looking for the next Anne of Green Gables

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[colyngbourne.livejournal.com]

Here's another one: that Jilly Cooper's Prudence has many features and details and sentences that strongly resemble ones in Josephine Tey's The Franchise Affair.

For the Anne/Rebecca situation, I wouldn't be at all surprised if there was 'heavy artistic influence'.

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Yikes - wouldn't have expected to see Jilly Cooper and Josephine Tey linked quite that way.

As I just said in my reply above, I'm wondering when the line between 'artistic influence' and outright plagiarism came to be drawn at about the place it's generally accepted to be these days. And though I'm not disagreeing with you about the influence, I actually managed to construct a quite plausible way in which there could have been so many similarities between the two books even if Montgomery hadn't read Rebecca. The more I read about them, the more I see how the writers of 'girls' stories' were totally immersed in this culture (both literary and non-) of discussion about girls, childhood and the process of growing into womanhood. Ack - must stop and write about this topic on the essay!

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

To establish actual plagiarism, you'd have to show that Montgomery had read Rebecca, before writing the equivalent Anne books, that there were resemblances which went beyond two people writing about an equivalent situation for a similar audience, and that this was deliberate, and an attempt to pass off as original something that was derivative (ie, not a deliberate commentary on the early books which people were expected to recognise as such). And if you came up with evidence of that, I would be sorry, because I would think less well of LMM because of it. But you have drawn out some suggestive parallels, haven't you? It sounds like the basis for a very interesting article, whichever conclusion you come to.