Pride and Plagiarism? No, TV historian Lucy insists, Austen book is ALL mine
IT IS a truth universally acknowledged that writers should not copy each other’s work.
But TV historian Lucy Worsley has been forced to defend herself against claims her new biography of Jane Austen is just a little too similar to an earlier book.
Worsley says she is ‘disappointed’ by suggestions that her work repeats research by Dr Paula Byrne without properly crediting it.
She insists her tome, Jane Austen At Home, was written with ‘integrity, conviction and love’ and that she has not taken anything directly from Byrne’s ‘excellent’ 2013 biography, The Real Jane Austen.
Worsley, 43, who is also chief curator of Historic Royal Palaces, took the unprecedented step of issuing a denial following a stinging review in Private Eye.
The magazine pointed out what it believes are ten similarities between Worsley and Byrne’s works. Phrases and quotations appear in both books, according to the review, which claimed the most ‘egregious unacknowledged borrowing’ related to ‘Byrne’s entirely original suggestion’ that a sketch of Austen by her sister Cassandra shows her looking out to sea.
Private Eye said that although Worsley had given Byrne a single mention in her bibliography, her acknowledgment of the real debt to Byrne was ‘conspicuous by its absence’.
In her response, Worsley said: ‘The facts and interpretations paralleled between my book Jane Austen At Home and Paula Byrne’s excellent The Real Jane Austen: A Life In Small Things, which I reference in my extensive footnotes, are not novel, are not unique to Byrne’s work, and would appear in any up-to-date, well-researched biography of Jane Austen.’
Dr Byrne, who has seen the review but not read Worsley’s book, told The Mail on Sunday: ‘I think I want to be gracious and say the more books about Jane Austen, the better for Jane Austen. I will wait to see Lucy’s book.’