She is known for accusing British writer H. G. Wells of having plagiarized her work when he wrote The Outline of History.

Florence Amelia Deeks was born in 1864 and grew up in Morrisburg, Canada West, in a religious family.

[1] Deeks decided to write a history of the world that showed the contributions that women had made.

[1] Her aim was to demonstrate the importance of women such as Lucrezia de' Medici, Elizabeth I of England and Margarethe, mother of Martin Luther.

[4] Deeks submitted it to Macmillan Company in Canada, asking if they would object to her using extracts from A Short History of the English People, a book for which they held the copyright.

William Andrew Irwin, then an associate professor of Old Testament Languages and Literature at the University of Toronto agreed to help her.

The trial judge, Mr Justice Raney, found that Irwin's results were "fantastic hypotheses ... solemn nonsense ... comparisons without significance.

[16] However, it was sworn on oath at the trial that the manuscript remained in Toronto in the safekeeping of Macmillan, and that Wells did not even know it existed, let alone had seen it.

Although the author clearly believes that Wells plagiarized Deeks' work, he presents no definitive proof.

Magnusson concluded that while Deeks may have received some discriminatory treatment from lawyers in the case, she was treated fairly by the courts.