If you must write prose/poems the words you use should be your own

The fact that it's a memoir makes it a more delicate area I suppose - obviously the events described still really happened, just... not in those words. Judith Kelly claims the plagiarism was unconscious, which makes sense in a way - her childhood experiences were so traumatic that she is unconsciously filtering them through something less threatening to remember: whole chunks of fiction.

Or, if you're going to use someone else's words, be upfront about it, and it will be seen as "clever" rather than "cheating". If she had just stuck to recasting her life as Jane Eyre's, that would have been a perfectly fine literary device.

I thought the whole thing - how this "memoir" could be framed in the experiences and language of various living and dead authors, including Charlotte Brontë - was quite funny, although plagiarism in general is not very funny. The claim that the plagiarist has a photographic memory was just hilarious.

She should have claimed intertextuality as an artistic medium.

All my plagiarism is unconcious, as is most of my writing and the lion's share of my life. I blame it on the blackouts. That's when I commit most of my crimes, too. It's becoming a problem.

Archel: I heard the R4 programme (Monday 8th August; I have not read your link yet), and I quite disagree with your interpretation of it. I think it was brave of Mantel to come on and stick up for herself, rather than relying on an agent, go-between or whatever; I think that she told it straight and could have been even tougher than she was; and I think that Alexandra Pringle, who defended Kelly, was an utter disgrace - mendacious, twisting, a weasel, who deployed a 'traumatic' paradigm now readily available in our culture to defend herself, her company and, yes, no doubt, her genuinely sometime traumatized author Kelly from an objection that was in truth unarguable. Her crassly smooth veneer, her dastardly, watery defence of wrongdoing, angered, and in their daring amazed, me.

there's gonna be some trouble

Almost all the poetry I write these days is built upon words by other people.

Perhaps you are right PF. I agree that the defence by the publisher was mealy-mouthed and unconvincing. I would have liked to see the author speak for herself, which in turn would have allowed Mantel to actually engage with her rather than just her actions.

Have any of you read my book?

I haven't. And that's a curious e-mail you've got, there, Jonathan.