Behind the byline

Anonymity by John Mullan

Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature

by John Mullan
224pp, Faber, £17.99

Jane Austen's niece Anna once found a copy of Sense and Sensibility in a circulatory library. Its title page said it was by "A Lady". The unfortunate Anna declared: "Oh that must be rubbish I am sure from the title." Her aunt, who was standing nearby, was amused.

Austen was one of many writers in the 18th and early 19th centuries who never published a single novel under her own name (she would even hide the evidence of her work in progress when friends came to visit). Throughout this period, and in the 16th and 17th centuries too, most fiction and much verse was published anonymously or pseudonymously. The list reads like an edited history of English literature. Edmund Spenser's Shepheardes Calender, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Samuel Richardson's Pamela, John Cleland's pornographic Fanny Hill, the works of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, Walter Scott's Waverley novels, Mrs Gaskell's Mary Barton, Tennyson's In Memoriam, the novels of "George Eliot", and Alice in Wonderland by CL Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll.


On the whole Mullan thinks the underlying reasons for anonymity were psychological and personal. But he also suggests why this mode of publication might suit the age of the novel. Fiction works by partial depersonalisation: Scott's anonymity "was a way of turning his personal experience into impersonal fiction", while Tennyson described In Memoriam, his anonymously published lament for the death of his friend Arthur Hallam, as "rather the cry of the whole human race than mine". The belief that literature presented general truths about humanity provided a strong impulse to withhold the name of its author.

The flipside of anonymous publication was, though, a fascination with authorship. Contemporary readers excitedly asked who was "a Lady", or "Lewis Carroll", or "Currer Bell". Some authors sought deliberately to stir up this excitement. Swift went to great lengths to ensure that Gulliver's Travels was not recognised as his: he paid for part of the manuscript to be copied out by someone else, so that his hand could not be identified, and had it delivered to the publisher through a string of intermediaries. The result was curiously akin to a marketing campaign: the whole of literary London began to wonder who might have composed this satire on the politics of Queen Anne's reign. In the 19th century reviewers would play Sherlock Holmes, inferring that the author of Jane Eyre was a northerner from the frequency of dialect words, or suggesting that sharply observed statements about female experience in George Eliot's early work could only have been written by a woman. Mrs Gaskell even asked her friend Mary Ann Evans ("George Eliot") for permission to "blush acquiescence" when it was suggested that she wrote Adam Bede

To the question "why did people publish anonymously?" Mullan very often gives the paradoxical answer that they did it in order to get noticed. As with the anonymous publication of Primary Colors, "exciting speculation was the point". This speculation extended to the cult of anonymous reviewing, which was the norm in the 19th century, and well on into the 20th in the Times Literary Supplement. Anonymous reviewing was supposed to have an impersonal and impartial authority. In fact, Mullan shows, it was an invitation to cronyism. One of William Godwin's novels was enthusiastically and anonymously reviewed in Blackwood's Magazine - by his daughter. More recently and more sportively Anthony Burgess reviewed one of his own pseudonymous novels. He didn't puff it though: he called it a "laughing stock" and was sacked for doing so.

I am not John Mullan's daughter. Honest. But this book is a marvellous combination of thought-provoking information and entertaining detail. It also raises a large and unsettling question. Why do we need to attach authors' names to books at all? Doing so makes life easy for librarians of course: just imagine arranging all those novels ascribed to "A Lady". Having names on books also helps us recognise works which we're likely to enjoy ("the new Ian McEwan"). It also allows for the simple human pleasure of piecing together an author's interests through their oeuvre, and feeling that you know how they think.


Authorial identities smell of the marketplace, and even in the age of anonymous publication printers and authors were keen to build on the success of a previous novel by the way they presented their latest. Austen's second published novel, Pride and Prejudice, was presented to the world as "by the Author of Sense and Sensibility". The publisher who printed Jane Eyre under the pseudonym of Currer Bell was keen to advertise the works of Anne and Emily Brontë as by "Mr Bell", rather than as the products of Acton and Ellis Bell. Anonymous authorship was more or less killed off by the literary marketplace, and Mullan's book makes one feel more than a little nostalgia for its teasing concealments.

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