The “Harry Potter” series and Le Guin’s “Earthsea” series both depicted schools for wizards.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Claim:
Ursula Le Guin wrote about fellow fantasy author JK Rowling, “The only thing that rankles me is her apparent reluctance to admit that she ever learned anything from other writers.”

Rating:
For several years, a quote from famed writer Ursula Le Guin has made the rounds on tumblr and Reddit, in which she appears to criticize fellow writer JK Rowling. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” book series, which was set in a magical school for wizards, was preceded by Le Guin’s “Earthsea” series that also depicted a school for magic.

Le Guin allegedly once said about Rowling:
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I didn’t originate the idea of a school for wizards — if anybody did it was T.H. White, though he did it in a single throwaway line and didn’t develop it. I was the first to do that. Years later, Rowling took the idea and developed it along other lines. She didn’t plagiarize. She didn’t copy anything. Her book, in fact, could hardly be more different from mine, in style, spirit, everything. The only thing that rankles me is her apparent reluctance to admit that she ever learned anything from other writers. When ignorant critics praised her wonderful originality in inventing the idea of a wizards’ school, and some of them even seemed to believe that she had invented fantasy, she let them do so. This, I think, was ungenerous, and in the long run unwise.

The above quote is authentic and was part of an essay by Le Guin, titled, “Art, Information, Theft, and Confusion, Part Two.” As such we rate this claim as “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. Per the website, Le Guin was a founding member of Book View Cafe and frequently published her writings on its blog.

Le Guin began the post by paying homage to science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, who she said heavily influenced her book “The Lathe of Heaven.” She detailed how she was not simply copying Dick’s work: “I’m trying to bring out the difference between copying a text into your own work, and applying techniques learned from a text to your own work. Then there’s the difference between imitation and emulation. It’s subtler, but really it’s almost as clear as the difference between copying a text and being influenced by it.”
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She then brought up her issue with Rowling, who she said simply did not credit other writers who may have influenced her work (emphasis, ours):

So, then, what’s the difference between being influenced by a body of work and admitting it, and being influenced by a body of work and not admitting it?

This last is the situation, as I see it, between my A Wizard of Earthsea and J.K.Rowling’s Harry Potter. I didn’t originate the idea of a school for wizards — if anybody did it was T.H. White, though he did it in single throwaway line and didn’t develop it. I was the first to do that. Years later, Rowling took the idea and developed it along other lines. She didn’t plagiarize. She didn’t copy anything. Her book, in fact, could hardly be more different from mine, in style, spirit, everything. The only thing that rankles me is her apparent reluctance to admit that she ever learned anything from other writers. When ignorant critics praised her wonderful originality in inventing the idea of a wizards’ school, and some of them even seemed to believe that she had invented fantasy, she let them do so. This, I think, was ungenerous, and in the long run unwise.

I’m happier with writers who, perhaps suffering less from the famous “anxiety of influence,” have enough sense of their own worth to appreciate their predecessors and fellow-workers in the saltmines of literature.

The whole history of a literature and of every genre within it is a chain of influences, inventions shared, discoveries made common, techniques adopted and adapted. Must I say again that this has absolutely nothing to do with copying texts, with stealing stuff?

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This was not the only time Le Guin criticized Rowling’s writing. In a 2004 interview with The Guardian, she called Rowling’s work “derivative”:

Interviewer: Nicholas Lezard has written ‘Rowling can type, but Le Guin can write.’ What do you make of this comment in the light of the phenomenal success of the Potter books? I’d like to hear your opinion of JK Rowling’s writing style.

Le Guin: I have no great opinion of it. When so many adult critics were carrying on about the “incredible originality” of the first Harry Potter book, I read it to find out what the fuss was about, and remained somewhat puzzled; it seemed a lively kid’s fantasy crossed with a “school novel”, good fare for its age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited.

In a 2005 profile of Le Guin in The Guardian, she both credited Rowling for giving fantasy a boost, and stated the same criticism of Rowling that she presented in the 2010 essay.

Her credit to JK Rowling for giving the “whole fantasy field a boost” is tinged with regret. “I didn’t feel she ripped me off, as some people did,” she says quietly, “though she could have been more gracious about her predecessors. My incredulity was at the critics who found the first book wonderfully original. She has many virtues, but originality isn’t one of them. That hurt.”