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?