So I’m late to this, but I’m just catching up on the #ReclaimHerName kerfuffle. And, given that Naming And Literature (with a side of gender) is kinda my thing, I obviously have thoughts...
The first thing to say is that, while really well-intentioned, this feels like a decision that was not properly thought through. And if I’d been asked, I’d have advised strongly against it. The reasons why have been given by many many people on twitter today.
It seems to apply a very simplistic model to all of these writers, assuming that they reluctantly published under male pseudonyms to avoid misogynist prejudice, and would have loved to publish under their birth names. So restoring those names = feminist act of reclamation.
Only, as many ppl have pointed out, this is not the case for all these writers. Women, like men, used pseudonyms for a variety of reasons. Often it’s about creativity. Sometimes it’s about a queer identity. Mostly it’s about money, tbh.
Once you realise this, the problem with #ReclaimHerName is obvious. One size of grand reclamatory gesture does not fit all women. It feels ham-fisted to lump all these women together and sell them as a ‘reclaimed’ set.
HAVING SAID THAT, some of the furious commentary around this has been way OTT. A lot of it has also laboured under a mistaken assumption that this initiative is at all unusual. That, whereas most editions respect a long-dead author’s wishes around their naming, this one doesn’t.
Yeah, no. This is kind of period-specific, but many (maybe most) modern editions of an 18thc text involve the imposition of a name upon an author who didn’t publish under it and would probably have rejected it out of hand.
As far as we have data for such a thing, it seems to show that many 18thc texts (72% of novels!) were published anonymously. Another, smaller, chunk were published pseudonymously. If the name the author used in personal life WAS used, it’d usually be inflected with a title.
And this affects women more than men. Usually you’d be Mrs or Miss, if you weren’t anonymous or some variation of ‘A Lady’. That’s how these female authors CHOSE to publish. But does Penguin, or Oxford World’s Classics, or whatnot, respect this today? No.
And, I mean, you can see why. Let’s take (let’s ALWAYS take!) the important novelist Frances Burney. Her first two novels were published anonymously. Her last two were published under her married name, Madame D’Arblay.
Those were the names she chose. Her deliberate self-fashionings. She CHOSE those onomastic self-fashionings. We - good feminists, unlike the Bailey’s Prize - respect those choices, right?
No, of course we don’t. It would be ridiculous to publish two of her books without authorly attribution and the other two under a name hardly anyone recognises. Or so we tell ourselves now. We need one consistent name for one important author, to enable us to talk about her.
As it happens - and as long-standing followers of mine will know, from my SPLEEN - there’s considerable debate about what this name should be. In the very early 20thc, the influential critic Austin Dobson decided for reasons best known to himself that it should be ‘Fanny Burney’.
Everyone ran with this until the 1980s, when feminist critics such as Margaret Doody decided that ‘Fanny’ (an intimate family nickname) was not really The Thing for a very important novelist, and they started calling her Frances Burney instead.
I myself am of the Frances Burney camp, and I imagine always will be - but I have to recognise that it is not the name she published under or would have wished to. Still, what’s my alternative? Make her even harder to search, find, discuss, than she is already?
I don’t know what she REALLY wanted, onomastically speaking. None of us do. Not you, not me, not the Baileys Prize. I do know that she wanted to sell novels, though. And I suspect it wouldn’t help her achieve that, today, to splinter her name into shreds.
My point is simply: that the ways in which ‘we’ (modern publishers, critics & readers) name historic writers is *usually* tricky, knotty & problematic. It’s more so (in some cultures) for women, because of more complex onomastic customs imposed/adhered to (eg marital name change)
So what the Women’s Prize is doing is nothing new. And I have no doubt it was well intentioned. So I’m not sure they deserve all the frothing venom I’ve seen today, tbh. Maybe a civil engagement that might encourage more consultation next time.
Anyway, a little while ago @zugenia and @ECFjournal generously invited me to write a Reflections piece on this very issue, which I accepted but then had to postpone because, pregnancy, baby, job change, pandemic. But this has got me thinking I should really get back to that.
Also, haha, one day my book on naming and identity in the late 18thc, where I really roll up my sleeves and get my hands filthy in the onomastic grime, will actually make it to press. Control yourselves. Patience. It will come.
