Kitty wrote novels of some popularity. Her method, admitted to Aaron alone, was
simple. She would take some work that had already proved its appeal and then, as she
put it, make her "corrections" and market the book as her own, which, in truth, it would
be. Happy endings would be imposed, the proud debased, the humble given the victory.
The couplings would be rearranged; one weapon would be substituted for another, hair
colors changed and coiffures traded one for the other. Clothing she redistributed with
little alteration, the fashions not always surviving, but a chic provided by way of
recompense. Gender change solved more than one problem, with new possibilities often
suggested. To place the settings beyond the reach of plagiarism, she would mix up the
backdrops, the furniture, and the props, creating not so much confusion as, more often
than not, an environment the reader found compelling in its singularity and invention.
When Aaron, in a letter responding to her confession, asked why—when she had so
much imagination at her disposal, so much craft at her service—why she didn't simply
write novels of her own devising, she answered that she was helpless without the anger
and frustration aroused by those who'd written the originals. They'd gotten it all wrong,
and she would set it right. Their mistakes fueled her imagination; they generated energy.
Without the goad of their errors, she had no will, no need to proceed. Her sense of
superiority allowed her to see their world and all its people with a clarity mad possible
by being seen by so great and grand a height, a vision obviously unavailable to her
precursors because they had failed to be, quite simply, Kitty McCloud. She was doing
them all a favor. She was doing the readers a favor. Taking o herself the burdens of
error, she made the necessary revisions. It was not, she claimed, a difficult task. So
egregious, so obvious, had been their mistakes, that it took minimum effort to return
intelligent understanding to its rightful place, to restore the reign of common sense and,
in the process, strike a significant blow for the cause of Kitty's bank account. . . .
Jane Eyre . . . . was the book currently being "corrected." In Kitty's version it would
be the Rochester character, not the madwoman, who would jump from the tower,
stricken as he was by Jane's refusal to participate in his proposed bigamy. The novel
would end with Jane's cure of the madwoman through kindness and sisterly care, their
affectionate friendship, and the fulfillment they would find in the practice of weaving
and—again, the phrase—animal husbandry.
~Joseph Caldwell, The Pig Did It, Harrison, NY: Delphinium, 2008, pp. 29-30.