This week, with much fanfare, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, together with its sponsor Baileys, unveiled, as part of the prize’s twenty-fifth anniversary celebrations, a “Reclaim Her Name” project: twenty-five novels whose women authors were originally published under male pseudonyms, now reissued with the author’s “real” or non-pen names, displayed on covers designed by a host of international illustrators, also all women. Available to download as e-books, with physical boxsets being supplied to libraries, the project, according to Bailey’s and the prize, is “finally giving female writers the credit they deserve”.
Well intentioned and laudable though this aim is, one may also argue that it misses the point of the pseudonymous writer, and the difference between the public and the private self, let alone the question of self-identification. These are subjects that should be treated with more sensitivity in these pluralistic times.
Does George Eliot, whose Middlemarch is featured here, really need “reclaiming” as Mary Ann Evans? The “Reclaim Her Name” bio glibly states that Eliot was “forced to use a male pen name”, as if she were incapable of making her own decisions. “George Eliot” was Evans’s public persona, with, surely, no need for retrospective correction. By the time Middlemarch was published, the reading public was fully aware of its author’s real identity. Besides, by 1871/72, when Middlemarch first appeared in instalments, the name she was known by was Marian Evans Lewes, as the common-law wife of her partner George Henry Lewes. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, “Mary Ann” was not used by Eliot from 1851 until 1880, the last year of her life, when she chose “Mary Ann Cross” on her marriage to John Walter Cross. Intentions matter, but so does legacy. Is it really for others to speak for Eliot/Evans and designate a different agency?
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