Anonymous Was a Woman
When we look at the women who dressed as men throughout history to gain access and opportunity or, hell, to be left alone, a different sort of disguise must also be considered: female writers who chose to write anonymously or pseudonymously. All told, âdisguiseâ isnât quite the right word, since what we come to see is that it isnât a one-size-fits-all situation. There are various contexts and reasons why a woman writer might choose a different moniker or none at all. But hold upâletâs ease into this one because itâs a biggie.
In Virginia Woolfâs A Room of Oneâs Own (1929), the striking mantra that Woolf repeats is that a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write. The anger and the sharp subtle humor of this brilliant woman speak to us through the ages and pages of Room. The book is based on two lectures Woolf delivered at Newnham and Girton, womenâs constituent colleges at Cambridge University, in 1928.
The constituent part is important here. In the 1870s, women were permitted to attend lectures at Cambridge, but they had to apply for special permission from each individual lecturer. Women won the right to sit for exams in 1881, but it wasnât until 1948 that they were awarded actual degrees, and that was hard won. They tried and tried over the years, but honestly, the men freaked the fuck out. A photo from 1897 featured in a BBC.com story about the history of women at Cambridge shows a massive protest by male undergraduates, all dressed in formal attire, wearing hats like fine gentlemen. In the photo these chaps are mutilating a female effigy in a courtyard at Cambridge, protesting womenâs rights to attend Cambridge as their equals. So thatâs fun. As Woolf says in Room, âThe history of menâs opposition to womenâs emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.â
One of the most noteworthy moments in Room is the now-iconic introduction Woolf makes to Shakespeareâs fictitious sister, Judith, who never stood a chance to exist in the first place. Even if she was witty, a keen observer, passionate about life, art, and humanity, even if she had all the gifts Shakespeare himself had, none of it would have mattered because Judith would not have been sent to get an education or tended to by tutors. She would have been tending to mutton stew or learning how to cross her ankles under her skirt so as to not create an unbecoming divot. And that was on a busy day. While Judithâs passion tries to win out, with her limited (nonexistent) support system, she inevitably succumbs to the depths of unrealized genius, unwanted brilliance, andâsuper dark hereâshe would kill herself. As Woolf paints it, âShe lies buried at some cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle.â Oof.
The other iconic moment in Room is when Woolf proposes that Anonymous was a woman. Like poor Judith, Woolf refers to the âsuppressed poet,â the woman who didnât dare write all that was inside her, and she ventured âthat Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.â
Itâs a compelling idea, but of course itâs not true. Not every writer who ever signed their work âAnonâ was female, and it would be impossible to know what percentage of them were. In the eighteenth century, it was considered in bad taste for anyone, even a man, to publish what they had written, but it seems it was doubly unacceptable for a woman. It was considered immodest and embarrassing. The âdoubly unacceptableâ part is key here because the horror of a woman being immodest continued well after the eighteenth century. There were simply too many ramifications for a woman who had opinions, not to mention one who dared to write them down or advertise them in some way. Woolf elucidates sarcastically, âPublicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still possesses them. They are not even now as concerned about the health of their fame as men are, and, speaking generally, will pass a tombstone or a signpost without feeling an irresistible desire to cut their names on it.â Ha! One canât help but think of a place in the twenty-first century called the internet where a woman who has an opinion, and has the gall to state it, is often met with harassment and even death threats. How little has changed when we have simply moved from unsigned pages to locked Twitter accounts where the wolves are blocked from coming to eat us. Some days âAnonymousâ looks very attractive.
According to the British historian James Raven, 80 percent of novels published between 1750 and 1790 were published anonymously. It was the default. I was shocked to discover that most English novels in the eighteenth century were written by women, many of whom published using their real names. These were not âfringeâ writers; rather, they were central to the rise of the novel. Nonetheless, the authors who are most talked about from that time, the ones we remember and deem canon worthy, are almost all men.
Despite the contributions of women, no novel from that time period that was written by a woman has the canonical stamp on it. It seems that certain Very Important Scholarly Types had opinions and made decisions that led to textbooks being written and curriculums made . . . and suddenly an entire generation of writers was dismissed and largely forgotten. For example, Ian Watt famously declares in The Rise of the Novel (1957) that even though the majority of eighteenth-century novels were written by women, it was âa purely quantitative assertion of dominance,â and, he seems to say, it was only Jane Austenâs arrival on the scene in the nineteenth century that showed us that women could be great writers, too. Ugh. Wattâs study, considered the seminal work on the origins of the novel, influenced a generation of scholars and untold curriculums. In response, we can hear the great seventeenth-century writer Aphra Behn, of whom Woolf said, âAll women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn . . . for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds,â rolling in her grave and muttering, âWell, fuck my drag.â
Now, allow me to host you at my salon, a meeting of the minds where you will get to meet a handful of brilliant women writers who wrote anonymously or using a pseudonym or sometimes both.
Jane Austen
Itâs not breaking news that people the world over are obsessed with Jane Austen. There are countless biographies, museums, websites, and film adaptations of her work. The world has a wide-on for Jane, and you can count me in with that lot. Jane is the shit. The irony of Austenâs superstar status, however, is that all her works were published anonymously during her lifetime. Her first novel, Sense and Sensibility, which was published (at her own expense, by the way) in 1811, was simply âBy a Lady.â Her next novel, Pride and Prejudice, was âBy the Author of Sense and Sensibility.â I love that Jane rejected both âAnonymous,â which was still commonplace, and the use of a pseudonym. She wished to write, she wished to publish her work, she wished to be read. But she did not wish to be known, or at least it was not yet customary to be known, especially for a woman. But she also had no interest in hiding the fact that she was a woman. âBy a Ladyâ is impressive.
Austen, in her anonymity, released book after book, each one going into multiple printings. Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma . . . what a run! Following Austenâs death in July 1817, at the age of forty-one, the novels Persuasion and Northanger Abbey were published posthumously as a set, again without an authorâs name. Janeâs brother Henry, however, contributed a âBiographical Noticeâ to the set that, for the first time ever, identified Jane as the author of the novels.
Though Austenâs work went out of print for a time after she died, her six finished novels were revived in 1832 and have never been out of print since. Some feel Henry unfairly âoutedâ Jane, while others believe what he did was a loving eulogy, a tribute to his gifted sister. The thing that stands out for me is that the only time a woman in the nineteenth century was entirely safe to be known as an authorâa great authorâwas when she was in fact dead and in the ground and could no longer be accused of boasting.
Mary Shelley
Mary Shelleyâs Frankenstein was published anonymously on January 1, 1818, with a preface by Maryâs poet husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. To this day there are those who argue that PBS, not Mary, penned the classic, one of the arguments being that a nineteen-year-old girl could not have written such a work. Frankenstein, whose monster has no name, making him also anonymous, was both panned and celebrated in its day. Reviews aside, it is one of the most influential novels of our time.
Maryâs mother was the great feminist philosopher and pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and someone we already know very well from the chapter on Margaret King! One wonders what Wollstonecraft, who was a spirited advocate for the education and advancement of womenâand who boldly stamped her name on everything she ever wroteâwould have thought of her daughter publishing a sensational book and not attaching her name to its cover and pages. Alas, Mary Wollstonecraft could respond with neither disappointment nor understanding because she died from complications following childbirth ten days after Mary junior was born.
After Frankensteinâs first printing, Mary Shelley agreed to put her name on subsequent editions and, one hopes, bask a little in its success. Mary Shelley was far more prolific than she is given credit for. She is so much more than Frankenstein, having written five other novels, a novella, and a great many poems, plays, and short stories. Itâs also important to note that despite the success of Frankenstein, Mary was not rich. After her husbandâs death, she worked tirelessly to support herself and her only surviving child with writing and editing jobs. Fiona Sampson observes in The Guardian, âThe archives are full of her unsuccessful attempts to pitch to publishers. Itâs hard to imagine a male author who had experienced similar popular and critical success being so consistently knocked back.â
By the time I first became aware of FrankensteinâI canât recall how old I wasâit was never called simply Frankenstein. As far as I can remember, it has always been referred to as Mary Shelleyâs Frankenstein, which has got to be some beautiful just-deserts recompense for the novel first being published with no name at all. Even though you would think that the name âMaryâ couldnât possibly be mistaken for a manâs name, I distinctly remember questioning as a young person whether Mary Shelley was a boy or a girl. Why? Probably because the book so prominently touted HER NAME in the title: Mary Shelleyâs Frankenstein. Even young Tracy in modern times, all loudmouthed and feminist, was marred by internalized misogyny and the ever-present patriarchy. I couldnât believe âtheyâ would let a womanâs name so boldly, so triumphantly be in the title of a legendary book from âthe olden days.â Listen, Iâll be the first to admit I was brainwashed back then. The patriarchy is a powerful drug!
As we move from the eighteenth century to the nineteenth and twentieth, we see more and more female writers, poets, and playwrights begin to crop up, but a new kind of anonymity emerges: the pseudonym, or nom de plume. And lest we think such a thing occurred only in days gone by, we need only remember that it wasnât that long ago that Joanne Rowling was told by her publishers that her female-sounding name would simply not do for a book hoping to find a young male audience. Of course, it wasnât a choice made out of safety concerns for the authorâno one in 1997 was going to accuse a woman of being an immodest trollop because she wrote a book. No, it was about sales. But that doesnât change the fact that the decision was steeped in misogyny! If you say you donât want to scare off little boy wizard readers with a female name . . . thatâs a problem, and boy oh boy does it sen...
