It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a publisher in possession of a classic book must fail to recognize it.

A literary trick that the organizer of fates has decreed must occur at least once a decade has been accomplished again: this time in Britain, this time with Jane Austen. As the Guardian reports, David Lassman, changing only names and titles, submitted chapters from Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, and Pride and Prejudice to eighteen major publishers and received rejection slips from nearly all of them. (Only Alex Bowler of Jonathan Cape recognized the original.)

The Guardian article is presented in the same spirit of affected shock that this genre of literary reporting requires. “Austen Plot Embarrasses Publishers,” the online headline sputters. Steven Morris, the article’s author, quotes David Balcock, head of the Jane Austen Center in Bath,

It’s interesting that there are these filters that stop work getting through. Clearly clerks and office staff are rejecting these manuscripts offhand.

I suppose every treason must have its clerk, but more interesting than asking How Could This Happen is to consider: what’s news? After all, this particular stunt has happened before. The London Times did it last year with VS Naipaul; Chuck Ross did it in 1979 with Jerzy Koskinski. In the 80s, Doris Lessing sent new novels to publishers under a pseudonym. One was rejected by her British publisher (Jonathan Cape, in the event); another publisher said it was too depressing to publish.

It’s not just the medium of the stunt that seems tired; the message too has become stale. Do we really need more proof that it’s hard for young writers to break in? Do we need more than the publishers’ own catalogs for evidence of caprice in their selection process? Does it shock us that an industry that so reliably pumps out false positives might every so often stumble across a false negative as well?

Or is the point supposed to be about the failure of education? That no responsible publisher would let herself (or her 23-year-old assistants) near a stack of submissions without having a firm grasp on the totality of English literary history? It’s a nice thought, but really?