Scandal! Bodice ripper scandal!
And not the good kind, either, where someone gets caught being wanton in the conservatory and has to get married by special license.*
I got an email a few days ago from Rikhei asking if I’d heard about the possibility that Cassie Edwards was a plagiarist. At first I thought she was talking about well-known fanfic rip-off artist Cassandra Claire, which was confusing since that happened a long time ago, although I am STILL kind of appalled that someone would rip off Zelazny’s Amber for HP slash.** (This reminds me, I keep meaning to write a post about Zelazny and Amber. Later.)
Anyway, then I clicked the link to Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books, which I have actually read in the past and I don’t know why I stopped keeping up with it, and realized that no, she was talking about Cassie EDWARDS, well-known horrifying American Indian culture appropriater, unparalleled in her use of the Noble Savage Standing in for Sensitive New Age Guys Who Would Actually Be Too Anachronistic To Stand, Even for Zebra.*** Indian romances are pretty common–generally featuring an Indian or mixed race hero and a feisty white heroine. I actually did a project on constructions of American Indian masculinity in these books for a sociology of gender course I took as an undergrad,**** in which I concluded basically that they were stand-ins for Sensitive New Age Guys Who… you get the picture.
Well, apparently, the Smart Bitches tried plugging some of her more wooden and weirdly out-of-place passages into Google, and they discovered that the reason they were out of place is that they were TOTALLY FREAKING PLAGIARIZED. In at least one case from a 1928 ethnography, which I take special note of as a social scientist. Perhaps someday chunks of my dissertation will appear, uncredited, in a lusty tale of Facebook intrigue.
I thought this was sort of half entertaining, half infuriating, given how pissed off I get about plagiarism in general–I was, after all, raised by academics–and then I was browsing my usual infotainment sources today and discovered that the story had broken in the popular press: Nora Roberts says peer lifted material
(In case you are not particularly romance-aware, Nora Roberts is a Big Deal.)
The AP article actually pulls its best punch by using one of the less egregious passages from Edwards’s work; you should definitely review the SB series to see some really incredibly obvious theft. Confronted with it, Edwards response was not particularly surprising:
Edwards, interviewed earlier this week by the AP, acknowledged that she sometimes “takes” her material “from reference books,” but added that she didn’t know she was supposed to credit her sources.
“When you write historical romances, you’re not asked to do that,” Edwards said, speaking from her home in Mattoon, Ill. She then asked her husband to get on the phone. He told the AP that his wife simply gets “ideas” from reference books.
“She doesn’t lift passages,” Charles Edwards said, adding that “you would have to draw your own conclusions” on how closely his wife’s work resembles other sources.
Although the part where she put her husband on the phone to handle it was kind of shocking. I realize that the woman is like 70, but one assumes that she’s handled the majority of her business contacts, etc., at least in communication with an agent. And really, what more is there to say after “she didn’t know she was supposed to credit her sources”? It’s like she’s an undergraduate or something! A plagiarizing culture-appropriating bosom-heaving undergraduate. I am totally putting some of the examples from SB on my next “What is plagiarism and how terrible will the vengeance of my TA be if I commit it” hand-out.
In fact, the AP article actually quotes the developer of TurnItIn, UW’s preferred plagiarism detection software: “Ms. Edwards’ unattributed use of other peoples’ work as her own definitely constitutes plagiarism.”
I wonder if she’ll be stripped of her RWA (Romance Writers of America) lifetime achievement award.
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*Ask me about the peerage some time. I should also note that I use the term “bodice ripper” with love. Before 11-year-olds could find porn on the internet, there were other people’s mothers’ stashes of romance novels.
**This probably makes no sense to you; that is okay. Just skim it.
***Does Zebra even still publish? And didn’t they have that awesome holographic logo?
****It was the only sociology course I took as an undergrad, actually. And now I have a masters degree!
January 11th, 2008 at 5:15 am
I left in the middle of this post to go and read examples, and as soon as I saw them, I thought “These would be great examples for me to use to warn my students about the evils of plagiarism!” And then I came back to your post and saw that you’d said the same thing.
January 11th, 2008 at 5:26 am
It’s amazing to me that the publisher seems to think that this is no big deal. Of course, the writing itself stinks — as SB points out, the passages are clearly stuck in there and interrupt the narrative flow. But surely, even when writing fiction, even trashy fiction, it’s not appropriate for the writer to drop whole paragraphs from another source into the prose without any attempt at attribution. Would it really have been that hard to use the ideas without using the same turns of phrase?
You can bet if she’d dropped chunks of another romance novel into one of hers that the response would have been different.