This book-writing lady did a bad thing, per U. of N. Carolina-Greensboro prof David A. Cook, in a letter to Times [of London] Literary Supplement 1/4/08:
In 1972, I was preparing to write an essay on [John Cowper] Powys’s Owen Glendower (1940), a two-volume, massively researched novel of the Welsh prince’s revolt against Henry IV, and I learned that a historical novel on the same subject had been published that year [1972] by G. P. Putnams.
This was Martha Rofheart’s Fortune Made His Sword (published in 1973 in the UK as Cry God for Harry). I quickly got my hands on a copy to see if Powys and Rofheart had used the same sources, but what I discovered was page after page of verbatim plagiarism. This was no accident: I counted more than a hundred such instances, extending over about 150 pages in the middle of the novel.
Martha gets a respectful hearing elsewhere however, especially at Randolph-Macon College, where an Honors 141 student observed that her 1976 novel The Alexandrian was “fun to read,” being “told from Cleopatra’s voice” and thus “interesting.” This novel also “allowed the readers to feel like they were Cleopatra.”
That’s nothing. Writing Fortune Made His Sword made her feel like John Cowper Powys. It must have been a wonderful experience.
Blithe Spirit 