Anonymity

John Mullan, the author of How Novels Work, has a new book that, as the previous one, contains Brontë references:

Anonymity
A secret History of English Literature
by John Mullan
Faber & Faber

A fascinatingly rich and entirely original study of why many of the greatest authors of English Literature chose to publish their work anonymously.
We have forgotten that the first readers of Gulliver's Travels or Sense and Sensibility had to guess who their authors might be, and that writers like Sir Walter Scott and Charlotte Brontë went to elaborate lengths to keep secret their authorship of the bestselling books of their times. But in fact anonymity is everywhere and no history of English Literature is complete without it. Donne, Marvell, Defoe, Swift, Fanny Burney, Austen, Byron, Thackeray, Lewis Carroll, Tennyson, George Eliot, Sylvia Plath and Doris Lessing - all chose to conceal their names. Why was it so important to authors to remain unidentified? What was it like to read their books without knowing for certain who had written them?
From the sixteenth century to the present, from Edmund Spenser to Primary Colors, John Mullan explores how the disguises of writers were first used and eventually penetrated, how anonymity teased readers and bamboozled critics - and how, when book reviews were also anonymous, reviewers played tricks in return. With great wit and lucidity, Anonymity presents a new and engaging way of enjoying English Literature.

John Mullan himself presents the book in this article in The Guardian:

From Jonathan Swift to Joe Klein, writers have gone to great lengths to hide their identities and cannily exploited the ensuing public speculation. John Mullan on how anonymity is often a sure route to notoriety
Many of the great books of English literature were originally published without their authors' names. It is one of the most frequent facts about literary works from before the 20th century, yet it is rarely thought worth a comment. We have forgotten that the first readers of Gulliver's Travels or Sense and Sensibility had to guess who their authors might be, and that writers like Sir Walter Scott and Charlotte Brontë went to elaborate lengths to keep secret their authorship of the bestselling books of their times. From Spenser and Donne to Dickens and Tennyson, most of the great names of English fiction and poetry used anonymity at some time.

Anonymity is not necessarily a matter of literal namelessness. Often it is difficult to distinguish between an anonymous and a pseudonymous work. Robinson Crusoe was published in 1719 without an author's name, but its title page declared it to be "Written by Himself", so we might say that it appeared under the pseudonym "Robinson Crusoe". When Thackeray used a pseudonym like Michael Angelo Titmarsh on a title page he was advertising the fact of a disguise to his readers, almost prodding them to imagine who the author might really be. If a pseudonym like "Currer Bell", used by Charlotte Brontë, signals that the true author is in hiding, you might say that the work is anonymous.

The Observer has published a review:

Mullan notes correctly that many of the greatest writers - all women - in the English literary canon (Jane Austen, the Brontes, George Eliot) at first all published anonymously or pseudonymously. 'Guessing the gender of an unknown author,' he writes, 'became part of the pleasure of reading.' (Robert McCrum)

Categories: Books