"She was defended by Alexander Graham Bell, and by Mark Twain... with a thumping hurrah for plagiarism, and..."

"... disgust for the egotism of 'these solemn donkeys breaking a little child’s heart with their ignorant damned rubbish! . . . A gang of dull and hoary pirates piously setting themselves the task of disciplining and purifying a kitten that they think they’ve caught filching a chop!'"

I'm reading Cynthia Ozick's "How Helen Keller Learned to Write/With the help of her teacher, Annie Sullivan, Keller forged a path from deaf-blind darkness to unimaginable artistry"  — from June 8, 2003 in The New Yorker.

I'm reading that because — and I can't remember why — I got to thinking how hard it is to believe that Helen Keller could have acquired the language skills needed to write the works attributed to her. (You, who are not blind, can see the entire text of her "Story of My Life" at Project Gutenberg.)

Ozick writes: