We suppose it was inevitable
…that Jane Austen would somehow be dragged into Kaavyagate.
Great authors make allusions. Ms. Austen did not lift the very language of Anne Radcliffe’s “Mysteries of Udolpho” to write her “Northanger Abbey.” She made allusions to that text and to its gothic conventions.
Yes, that’s true; the plot of NA is similar in many respects to that of Udolpho, but as the letter-writer pointed out, it is an allusion, not wholesale lifting.
(Ms. Austen? Ms.?)
In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past month or so, Harvard undergrad Kaavya Viswanathan’s newly-published book, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got A Life was found to contain some passages that bore a striking similarity to passages in two books by Megan McCafferty and other books by Sophie Kinsella, Meg Cabot and, of all people, Salman Rushdie. It is unclear how much of the plagiarism is Miss Viswanathan’s responsibility and how much of it the book packager with which she worked encouraged or inserted. Read about Kaavyagate in detail at Wikipedia, because it gives us a headache.
Incidentally, as far as Miss Viswanathan’s supposed half-million-dollar advance goes, we heard from pretty good sources that it was closer to 40K for her and 40K for the book packager that “designed” the book for her–not that that is a negligible sum, but not a cool half-million, certainly. An editorial aside: how is a young person to learn how to function on her own as an adult if she was coached through her university admission and coached through the writing of her first book? Better to let her try for herself and fail and then try again, having learned something in the process. So sayeth the Editrix.
P.S. Private to the very intelligent and excellent student-writers at the Harvard Crimson, whose prose has consistently impressed us throughout this episode and given us hope for the future of western civilization: It’s spelled “Whereas.” Word to the wise and all that.
