Born: 1864, Canada
Died: 1959
Country most active: Canada
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
In 1919, Canadian writer and teacher Florence Deeks received bad news—the publisher Macmillan had rejected her manuscript, a feminist history of the world submitted eight months earlier. It seemed odd that the pages were clearly in bad condition, worn, torn and dog-eared—why had a manuscript that had clearly been well-used been rejected? She got her answer the following year, when she read The Outline of History, published by Macmillan under H. G. Wells’s name. The published book bore too many similarities to her own rejected work to be a coincidence—the same themes, organisation, choices of words, as well as leaving out most of the history of India. Even the mistakes matched, such as spelling the name of the pharaoh Hatshepsut as “Hatasu,” claiming the Phoenicians traded by land rather than sea, and inaccurately describing the Roman general Sulla as “aristocratic.”
Deeks spent years trying unsuccessfully to sue Wells for copyright infringement, taking her case all the way to the British Empire’s highest court at the time, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. In the first trial before Justice Raney of the High Court division of the Supreme Court of Ontario, Deeks called multiple expert witnesses to attest to the similarities in the two manuscripts. Wells and Macmillan simply denied her allegations. The judge disregarded the expert witnesses’ “fantastic hypotheses” as “an infinite deal of nothing,” ruling against Deeks and ordering her to pay court costs. She was no more successful in her appeals. In its title, a 2002 book on the subject reflects the narrative of the time, which derided Deeks and idealised Wells: The Spinster and the Prophet.