I know what you mean! I first read “bodice rippers” when I entered my early teens. It wasn’t long before I realized I wanted more from a book as well. lol I haven’t read any of her works thankfully.

And that is the problem, the amount of “borrowed” content that is abundant in her books. Can these even be called her books anymore since the bulk of them is made up of lifted passages from other works?

And then of course, this raises the question of whether or not any of the material is hers to begin or if she was borrowing ideas from someone else for her “original” parts of books. Point of fact, her integrity as a writer has been called into question here.

Can readers trust anything that has her named stamped on it now? Should they?

I don’t think it’s so much as someone else doing the research and not knowing the source, because that implies that she was at least acknowledging that she used sources for her information. She wasn’t doing that. So this was a deliberate omission on her part, she got information, didn’t care where so long as it made her sound good, and slapped it into her books. Done and done.

I’m not sure if I agree with the statement that fiction writers are under the false impression that they don’t need to cite/acknowledge their sources. I’ve seen many authors from a variety of genres include an appendix to their book that includes notes on where they looked for information. More common however is the Thank You/Acknowledgments page at the front of the book. People tend to skip it, but the authors often thank their publishers, people who gave them information X, people who provided a map of Y, people who checked the historical Z’s, and so on.

Since she didn’t do this the implication is that she didn’t want to even acknowledge that the ideas and concepts were not her own. That screams “intent” to me.

Even if she had cited her sources, the sheer volume of the borrowed material would be problematic.