One of the UK’s biggest nonfiction books of the year, Rock Me Gently, a memoir by Judith Kelly, seems to bear “striking similarities” to the 1933 Antonia White novel Frost in May, according to a Reuters wire story by Jeffrey Goldfarb and Cheryl Juckes. Kelly’s book was released in February by Bloomsbury and shot up to the top ten of the non-fiction bestseller list, and is still selling extremely well (it was number 469 on Amazon.co.uk yesterday). But the book, about Kelly’s claim of having been abused as a child by nuns at a Catholic orphanage, “includes numerous passages and characterisations that are similar, and in some cases identical, to those in Antonia White’s acclaimed semi-‘autobiographical novel,” say Goldfarb and Juckes. Kelly wasn’t talking, but Bloomsbury editor in chief Alexandra Pringle admits “There are striking similarities to ‘Frost in May’ and other books” (a charge the Reuters story doesn’t make, and doesn’t herein follow up on). However, Pringle continues, “We have sought legal advice and apparently there are not enough similarities to count as infringement of copyright.” But the Reuters story notes something else strange about the story: when Frost in May was reissued in 1978 by Virago Modern Classics, the editor at Virago was Alexandra Pringle.