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LONDON, June 30 (Reuters) - A 2005 best-selling memoir about a child abused by nuns contains passages strikingly similar to those in a renowned 1933 book on growing up in a convent, UK publisher Bloomsbury said.
Judith Kelly's "Rock Me Gently", released by Bloomsbury in February, includes numerous passages and characterisations that are similar, and in some cases identical, to those in Antonia White's acclaimed semi-autobiographical novel, "Frost in May".
The revelation comes as Bloomsbury gears up for the release of the sixth instalment of the Harry Potter saga, a lynchpin to the company's financial success.
"There are striking similarities to 'Frost in May' and other books and the author is at the moment going through the text and checking everything to make sure that the text is corrected for the next edition," Bloomsbury Editor-in-Chief Alexandra Pringle wrote in an email on Wednesday.
The next edition will be a paperback due out in February 2006, a Bloomsbury spokeswoman said.
The email was in response to a Reuters query about the similarity of the passages.
"We have sought legal advice and apparently there are not enough similarities to count as infringement of copyright," Pringle wrote. "However, it is obviously essential that this is dealt with and as swiftly as possible."
The media industry has been rocked in recent years by several high-profile plagiarism cases, with renowned U.S. historians Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin among those facing accusations of copying others' work.
According to her publicity material Judith Kelly was born in Southampton. After leaving a Catholic orphanage in the mid-1950s, where the events of Rock Me Gently took place, Judith Kelly was placed into the Licensed Victuallers' School. There she was encouraged by her English teacher to read widely and develop her talent for writing. After leaving school, Judith spent time on a Kibbutz in Israel. When she returned to England, she was accepted into Chelsea School of Art and thereafter worked for the Keeper of the British Collection at the Tate Gallery, London, until she began her career in television production at TV-am, Reuters and BSkyB. Now retired, Judith Kelly runs a support group for those who were abused by priests and nuns within the Catholic Church.
We will leave you to decide whether her book is fact or fiction, and to what extent it represents events which actually occurred.