Got a feeling that Mary Ann Evans - author of unquestionably the best English novel - might be trusted to make her own decision?
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Would her work be taken seriously today under her own name? Or would it have been called 'chick lit'?
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I really don't like this. No one forced these writers to choose their pseudonyms, and their individual reasons for doing so were extremely varied.
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Many female authors historically published under male nom de plumes to avoid prejudice in a completely male-dominated field. Women who wanted to be something other than wives or mothers, often took male pseudonyms out of necessity. So yes, they were “forced”.
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I understand the sentiment behind doing this, and I realize that some of these authors may no longer be with us, but it seems wrong to do this without getting consent to do so?
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Vernon Lee wasn’t a pseudonym, it was the name she went by all the time - a fact intimately tied up in her queer identity. This isn’t feminism, it’s a denial of autonomy to dead geniuses who can’t respond.
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Yes, Bronte! I knew you'd have something to say and much more eloquently than I did.
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if someone did that to me after I died I’d come back to eat them alive
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Robyn Warhol’s Gendered Interventions is from 1989 and details how it wasn’t just women who adopted male pseuds in 19C — men found it commercially savvy to do so as well. On top of others’ arguments about some pseuds not being pseuds but their actual chosen names.
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What about the women who wanted to write under those names? This seems like it could erase queer female authors who chose a masculine name to express their identity more fully.
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