Anon, Pseud and ‘By a Lady’: The Spectre of Anonymity in Women’s Literary History

Abstract

So wrote Virginia Woolf, who in A Room of One’s Own (1929) encapsulated the feminist recovery project’s determination to recuperate the lost voices, words and lives of past women writers. Yet even as A Room of One’s Own dares its readers to imagine a matriarchal textual genealogy to rival its canonical, male-dominated counterpart, it resists the temptation it puts before them. In part, the difficulty of such a project lies in Anon’s intractability. It may be ‘true’ that she was ‘often a woman’, but equally, it ‘may be false’. Where she has been firmly identified, Woolf unearths merely an unholy ‘relic of the sense of chastity that dictated anonymity to women’. In the examples of Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and George Sand, all of whom famously adopted male pseudonyms, she finds women who capitulated to the notion ‘that publicity in women is detestable’.² Nonetheless, Woolf recognized Anon’s value both for women writers and for women’s literary history. Thus, the bifurcated objective of A Room of One’s Own is not simply to give Anon a name, but to do so while attempting to preserve the liberating potential of her outsider status. As Jane Goldman reminds us, Anon’s ‘legacy’ for Woolf, as articulated in this work at least, lies in its refusal of the ‘model of authorial subjectivity’—that is, the author as ‘individual, singular, […] absolute’ and male—‘constructed in patriarchy’.³