Literary relatives share similar writing styles

A contributor to The Conversation discusses how 'new research suggests literary relatives share similar writing styles'.

Examining an author’s style based on their tendency to choose particular words is increasingly done with a process called “stylometry”. Stylometry uses computers to statistically measure the most frequent words in a text. Authors are consistent with the regularity with which they use certain words, so counting words can give an indication as to how a particular author or group of authors tend to write.

Stylometry is most often used for authorship attribution, answering (usually unfounded) questions around who really wrote a particular novel, as has been the case with Wuthering Heights and Go Set A Watchman. [...]

In my research, I used stylometry to look at the writing styles of the following literary families: Kingsley and Martin Amis (father-son), Anne, Charlotte, and Emily Brontë (sisters), William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Shelley (father-mother-daughter), A.S. Byatt and Margaret Drabble (sisters), W. Somerset and Robin Maugham (uncle-nephew), John le Carré and Nick Harkaway (father-son).

The results show that relatives involved usually wrote in similar styles. Without exception, each of the authors tested clustered with the other members of their family. This means that the computer was able to tell different families apart, based on their respective writing styles, with 100% accuracy. The next stage would be doing a larger study with more families to see if this trend holds more widely.

This recent experiment was prompted by my previous study on the Brontës (perhaps one of the most famous literary families), which shows that, compared with a selection of their peers, the Brontë siblings all share a remarkably similar literary style. This is perhaps unsurprising when you consider the extent to which the Brontës are known to have collaborated, but this trend also seems consistent across other families.The creative collaboration seen with families like the Brontës is common practice among relatives who all write. But it’s still significant to see that familial influence is so strong that it can be detected using stylometric techniques. This could indicate that essential characteristics of an author’s voice might be inherently connected to their formative environments and upbringing. (James O'Sullivan)

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