Ursula Le Guin wrote of her fantasy colleague JK Rowling: “The only thing that annoys me is her apparent reluctance to admit that she has ever learned anything from other writers.”
For several years, a quote from the famous author Ursula Le Guin has been doing the rounds on Tumblr and Reddit, in which she apparently criticizes her colleague JK Rowling. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” book series, which is set in a magic school for wizards, was preceded by Le Guin’s “Earthsea” series, which also depicted a school for wizards.
Le Guin is said to have once said about Rowling:
The idea of a wizarding school was not mine – if it was, it was TH White’s, although he put it forward in a single casual line and did not develop it further. I was the first to do that. Years later, Rowling took up the idea and developed it in a different way. She did not plagiarize. She did not copy anything. In fact, her book could hardly be more different from mine in style, spirit, and everything else. The only thing that annoys me is her apparent unwillingness to admit that she ever learned anything from other authors. When ignorant critics praised her wonderful originality in inventing the idea of a wizarding school, and some of them even seemed to think she had invented fantasy, she let them have their way. This was, in my opinion, petty and, in the long run, unwise.
The above quote is authentic and was part of an essay by Le Guin entitled “Art, Information, Theft and Confusion, Part Two.” Therefore, we rate this claim as a “correct attribution.”
The above essay was not available online, so we reached out to her estate. A spokesperson directed us to an archived link. The essay appeared in 2010 on the website of Book View Cafe, an online bookstore and blog. According to the website, Le Guin was a founding member of Book View Cafe and frequently posted her writings on its blog.
Le Guin began her paper with a tribute to science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, who greatly influenced her book The Lathe of Heaven. She explained at length that she did not simply copy Dick’s work: “I try to emphasize the difference between copying a text into your own work and applying techniques learned from a text to your own work. Then there is the difference between imitation and emulation. It is more subtle, but actually almost as clear as the difference between copying a text and being influenced by it.”
She then brought up her problem with Rowling, who, in her opinion, simply did not mention other authors who might have influenced her work (emphasis ours):
So what is the difference between being influenced by a work and admitting it and being influenced by a work and not admitting it?
The latter, as I see it, is the situation between my book The Wizard of Earthsea and JK Rowling’s Harry Potter. The idea of a wizarding school was not mine – if it was at all, it was TH White’s, although he formulated it in a single casual line and did not develop it further. I was the first to do so. Years later, Rowling took up the idea and developed it in a different way. She did not plagiarize. She did not copy anything. In fact, her book could hardly be more different from mine in style, spirit and everything else. The only thing that annoys me is her apparent unwillingness to admit that she ever learned anything from other authors. When ignorant critics praised her wonderful originality in inventing the idea of a wizarding school, and some of them even seemed to think she had invented fantasy, she let them have their way. This was, in my opinion, petty and, in the long run, unwise.
I am happier with writers who perhaps suffer less from the famous “fear of influence” and who have sufficient self-esteem to appreciate their predecessors and colleagues in the salt mines of literature.
The entire history of a literature and of every genre within that literature is a chain of influences, shared inventions, shared discoveries, adopted and adapted techniques. Need I say again that this has absolutely nothing to do with copying texts or stealing things?
This was not the only time Le Guin criticized Rowling’s work. In a 2004 interview with The Guardian, she called Rowling’s work “derivative”:
interviewer: Nicholas Lezard wrote, “Rowling can type, but Le Guin can write.” What do you think of this comment, given the phenomenal success of the Potter books? I would love to hear your opinion on JK Rowling’s writing style.
LeGuin: I don’t have much of an opinion of it. When so many adult critics were raving about the “incredible originality” of the first Harry Potter book, I read it to find out what all the fuss was about, and was left somewhat confused; it seemed a mixture of vivid child’s fantasy and “school novel,” good fare for its age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather malignant.
In a 2005 Guardian profile of Le Guin, she praised Rowling for boosting fantasy literature, but also made the same criticism of Rowling that she made in her 2010 essay.
Her praise of JK Rowling, who “gave a boost to the whole fantasy genre,” is mixed with regret. “I didn’t feel like she was ripping me off like some people have,” she says quietly, “although she could have been kinder to her predecessors. I was amazed at the critics who found the first book wonderfully original. She has many virtues, but originality is not one of them. That hurt.”
