Does the dust jacket for Katie Hickman's novel The Aviary Gate, out this month, look familiar? It should. Ellen T. White's Simply Irresistible, a self-help book referencing historical sirens released last December, pictured the same 1892 painting: ''Leila,'' by Sir Frank Dicksee. And next month, Karen Essex's historical novel Stealing Athena features Marie-Geneviève Bouliard's strikingly similar 1794 work ''Aspasia.''
The big surprise is that the publisher of Gate, a novel about a 16th-century courtesan-in-training, knew all about Irresistible's cover. ''We talked about it,'' says Sabrina Farber, associate publisher at Bloomsbury USA. But since the books are quite different, released months apart, and even stocked in different sections of stores, she says, ''we felt as though it wouldn't matter, one way or another.''
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