My grandmother once said to me, “If you see ‘anon’ written after a quote, it probably means a woman said it.” Although her comment may have been somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and I was later to discover she was paraphrasing feminist writer Virginia Woolf, it is certainly a good way to make the point that women have historically been marginalised and dismissed by a male dominated society – and that criticism can also be levelled at the world of literature.
When Charlotte Brontë was twenty years old, she sent some of her work to the poet laureate of the day – Robert Southey – and he sent her the following response: “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life.” Undeterred, she continued to write, but wisely chose a pen-name which was something less feminine: Currer Bell. Eleven years later, she would go on to write the famous bildungsroman Jane Eyre, a novel that would go become one of the most famous and best loved of all English novels.
Her sisters, too, decided a nom de plume would help them get their books published more easily, and they seemed to be right in their judgement, as the following successes suggest: Emily Brontë would become Ellis Bell and see Wuthering Heights published, and Ann would become Acton Bell and see The Tenant of Wildfell Hall become one of the first feminist novels in print.
Some of literature’s best-loved books were written by women, but were first published either anonymously or under a pen-name. The following is a selection:
Middlemarch by George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (Anonymous)
To Kill A Mockingbird by Nelle Lee (Harper Lee)
Harry Potter (series) by J.K. Rowling (Joanne Rowling)
The reasons for choosing a male pen-name are varied, and other female writers published under their own names, and were also hugely successful, from Jane Austen to Agatha Christie.
As part of our cross-curricular project, Year 9 were tasked with delving deeper into the world of female literary greats, and they produced the PowerPoint presentations you can see below:
All names are original.