The Footnote

The quotation was everywhere. It was painted on the wall of a children's library in Leeds, printed on tote bags, embroidered on cushions and repeated, at a conservative estimate, in about four thousand speeches a year. A library is a garden that grows in the dark. Underneath it, always, was the same name: Margaret Ashby, the Victorian novelist whose books nobody read anymore but whose single sentence everyone seemed to know.

Irene had used it in the first line of her thesis proposal. She was in her second year of a doctorate in Oxford, writing about public reading rooms in nineteenth-century England, and the quotation seemed made for her. Her supervisor, Dr. Hallam, a small, dry man who read everything with a pencil in his hand, returned the draft with one word circled in the margin. The word was Ashby. Beside it he had written: Source?

"Everybody knows she said it," Irene protested at their next meeting. Dr. Hallam nodded pleasantly. "Everybody knows a great many things," he said. "I'm asking where she said it. Which novel? Which letter? Which page?" He suggested that she find the original before she quoted it, and added, almost as an afterthought, that in thirty years he had never managed to find it himself.

So Irene went looking. She read Ashby's six novels in the Bodleian, one after another, through a long gray November. She read the two volumes of her collected letters and a biography published in 1972. The sentence was not there. Nor was anything like it. Ashby wrote about libraries only once, in a letter to her sister, and what she said was that the one in her town was cold, badly lit and full of men who coughed.

Next, Irene tried to work backwards. The internet was no help; it simply repeated the quotation, with the name attached, in thousands of identical copies. But in the library's catalog she found a book of inspirational quotations published in 1958, and there, on page 112, was the sentence, credited to Ashby with no source at all. Every later appearance she could trace seemed to come, directly or indirectly, from that one page.

Dr. Hallam was intrigued, though he warned her not to get carried away. "The editor may simply have been lazy," he said. "Or he may have had a source that we don't. You can claim that the attribution is unsupported. You can't yet claim that it's false." Irene wrote this down carefully. She was beginning to understand that in academic English the choice of verb was a moral decision. A scholar who asserted something had better be able to prove it; one who suggested it was leaving the door open.

It was a retired librarian who opened the next door. Mrs. Agnes Fell had worked for forty years in a small county library and now volunteered two mornings a week in the local record office, and she answered Irene's email within an hour. She had, she said, always had her doubts about that quotation. The editor of the 1958 anthology had lived in her town. She recalled that he had collected newspaper cuttings, and that his papers had been donated to the record office after his death.

There were eleven boxes. Irene spent four days going through them, wearing white cotton gloves, while Mrs. Fell brought her tea and told her which of the cuttings had been badly filed. On the fourth afternoon, in an envelope marked simply Libraries, she found a yellowed page from a local newspaper dated March 1931. It was a letter to the editor, protesting against a proposal to close the town's reading room. The writer argued that the reading room was the only warm place many children had, and ended with the words: A library is a garden that grows in the dark.

The letter was signed M. Ashby. But the address underneath was a council house on the edge of the town, and a few minutes in the census records confirmed what Irene had begun to suspect. The writer was Mary Ashby, aged thirty-four, a cleaner at the local school. The novelist Margaret Ashby had been dead for almost forty years by then. The anthology's editor, it seemed, had cut out the letter, kept the initial and supplied the more famous first name himself.

Irene's article appeared the following year, with a title that Dr. Hallam had suggested and she had initially rejected as too modest: A Note on an Attribution. She was careful in it. She did not accuse the editor of fraud; she stated that the evidence pointed strongly to an error, and she acknowledged that she could not rule out an earlier source. Mrs. Fell was thanked in the first footnote. Mary Ashby, she later wrote, deserved more than a footnote, and so she gave her the last paragraph.

A local newspaper picked up the story, and then a national one. The children's library in Leeds repainted its wall. The sentence was the same, but the name beneath it was new, and so was the line underneath that: Mary Ashby, school cleaner, in a letter to the editor, 1931. Irene went to see it in the spring. She stood in front of it for a long time, and then she took a photo and sent it to Dr. Hallam. He replied with one word. The word was Source.