HP launches OriginalWriters project
The Brazilian project OriginalWriters by the company HP and an advertising agency wants to encourage the reading of novel female writers who used male pseudonyms. The company decided to make new covers, so that readers can know the real identity of its female authors. The plan also includes the translation of these works for publication in Portuguese.
Books by 19th-century and early 20th-century female authors, especially European ones, were already available on the Gutenberg Project website – which offers, free of charge, more than 50,000 works in the public domain. The project also includes the search for Brazilian women who have done the same and who can have their books available free.
In the previous post we saw why novel writers use male pseudonyms as their book signatures. This happened not only in the 18th and 19th centuries; it also extended throughout the 20th century.
"This is still common in the academic world, in the sciences. There is a bias in favor of male authority in knowledge. It is a bias that is sometimes implicit, unconscious. We think it has changed, but in fact it has not changed that much," says the female researcher Sue Lanser, professor of English, comparative literature and studies on women, gender and sexuality at Brandeis University, in the United States.
"If there was any questionable sexual element in the novels, or considered inappropriate for a society lady, they would be judged. The pseudonym was also a way of protecting one's personal life."
However, according to the researcher, the phenomenon has not disappeared completely. At the beginning of the 20th century, the French-British Violet Paget kept her writings – which ranged from books on travel and music to supernatural tales, art reviews, essays on liberalism and novels – under the pseudonym Vernon Lee, perhaps also to avoid comments about her sexual orientation.
In the 1990s, British female writer J.K. Rowling withheld her first name, Joanne, at the suggestion of the company that published her work. In interviews after the worldwide success of her Harry Potter book series, she said she was persuaded by her editor to abbreviate her first names. Her more ambiguous signature would make it easier for the books to be read by boys.
To escape the expectations surrounding her first detective novel, Rowling also chose a male pseudonym, Robert Galbraith. Nevertheless, she was soon discovered. The book had sold poorly, but received such positive reviews that it raised suspicions that it was not a debut novel by a new author. After the revelation, a first signed edition of the work was sold for more than US$ 2,300.
Men x women
The phenomenon of market segmentation between "Literature for women" and "Literature for men" is also something recent and contributes to the fact that female writers who want to exceed the public's expectations for their books change their names, as in the case of JK Rowling and Harry Potter.
Sandra Vasconcelos, female professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of São Paulo (USP), recalls that men also read fiction novels. Men made much of the comments on novels made in the newspapers. In addition, some of the greatest novels with female protagonists are by male writers. There was no such difference because everyone read everything.
For Sue Lanser, today, publishers interfere a lot in the lives of books and authors making decisions that have this market segmentation as justification. She also agrees that the phenomenon is modern.
"Now there's a bigger dichotomy in terms of gender and reading practices. Since Jane Austen, for example, became popular, it has only been in the last 20 years that men have stopped reading her and no longer want to take classes about her", she says.
“It is absurd to consider, in the 21st century, that stories about women, especially if they have some kind of love story in the plot, are automatically considered minor Literature and women only".
We cannot change history
If the HP project says it intends to reprint the history of these writers using their own names, American researcher Sue Lanser warns that the idea needs to be careful. "It's a good idea, but it's also important to keep the names under which they originally published their works. It's a way of honoring the trajectory of these women."
“Not all of them just wanted to protect themselves with the pseudonym. Some were trying to inhabit other identities. Perhaps Mary Ann Evans or Violet Paget felt like George Eliot and Vernon Lee when they wrote. Even if some of them were trying to hide, we also need to show our past, we cannot change it. You cannot change history and turn it into something we would like it to be".
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