Ghosts and Dolls

Sometimes, for some people, a piece of writing’s attribution alone suffices to taint or burnish it. The attribution might be to this or that individual writer, or to one or another kind of writer. Those who take a piece of writing to be tainted in this way need no acquaintance with what it contains to support their judgement; attribution suffices. It wasn’t, for example, uncommon in nineteenth-century England for female writers to publish under male pseudonyms. The Brontë sisters each did that when they began to publish, as did Mary Ann Evans, who is still mostly known as George Eliot. They did it principally because they and their publishers judged that under a female name their works would attract fewer readers; they would be read, if at all, read differently, with condescension or ridicule. Masculine pseudonymity in this case was a protective strategy. Those who used it wanted attention paid not to their persons in a kind but to what they’d written. What the Brontës and Evans trie ... Read full article.