“In the nineteenth century, the curious phenomenon of pseudonymity reached its height,” Carmela Ciuraru writes, “and as early as the mid-sixteenth century, it was customary for a work to be published without any author’s name.” She says that there was a “decline of pseudonyms in the twentieth century,” but of the authors whom she discusses in “Nom de Plume,” from the Bronte sisters to Pauline Reage, more than half published their work — and hid behind their pseudonyms — in that same century. This suggests that in literature, as in show business and pop music, manufactured names are still to be reckoned with.
“Nom de Plume” is an interesting book, but by its very nature an odd one. After laying the groundwork in her thoughtful introduction, Ciuraru is left with not a great deal more to say about the pseudonyms her subjects adopted. There is little documentation about these choices and in some instances no testimony from the authors themselves. So there’s not much she can do except write thumbnail biographies of her 18 subjects. Fortunately Ciuraru, a freelance literary journalist, writes well and has a fully functioning sense of humor, so “Nom de Plume” is a pleasure to read, even if it’s much ado about not very much.
“What’s in a name?” Ciuraru asks, and replies: “Everything. Nothing. Some writers find that crafting prose under the name they were born with is too restrictive. It can seem oddly false, or perhaps not grand enough to accompany their literary peregrinations. A name carries so much baggage; it can seem tired and dull. Too ethnic. Too stultifying. Too old. Too young. In such instances, an author may be unable to proceed if he is, say, Samuel Clemens, but feels capable of achieving impressive feats if he is Mark Twain.” Her study of pseudonyms, Ciuraru writes, suggests several themes, among them “the complex psychological machinery of authorial identity; the perils of literary fame; the struggles of the artist within a society generally hostile to such a vocation; courage and faith; and the nature of creativity itself.”
True enough, and there is evidence of all these in the mini-biographies she writes. It seems to me, though, that her dominant theme involves the pressures and difficulties faced by women as they sought to work as writers in a culture dominated by men and to discuss subjects generally regarded as unsuitable for women. Thus we have the most famous 19th-century examples: Anne, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, who wrote as, respectively, Acton, Currer and Ellis Bell; Aurore Dupin, who wrote as George Sand; and Marian Evans, who wrote as George Eliot. We have the personal testimony of Charlotte Bronte about the choices she and her sisters made, published in posthumous editions of two of the sisters’ novels:
“Averse to personal publicity, we veiled our own names under those of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell; the ambiguous choice being dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian names positively masculine, while we did not like to declare ourselves women, because — without at that time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called ‘feminine’ — we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice; we had noticed how critics sometimes use for their chastisement the weapon of personality, and for their reward, a flattery, which is not true praise.”
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