What's in a pen name?

We’ve all heard that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but what about the name on the cover? Should it be the author’s real name or her chosen one?

The Reclaim Her Name series is a re-release of books “with their author's real name on the cover for the first time.” To mark the 25th anniversary of the Women's Prize for Fiction, there are 25 books available for free download or eBooks (which definitely keeps costs down for printing and shipping).


It’s a fact that women have written some of the best novels ever published. It’s also a fact that some of those novels feature a man's name in place of the authors.



The question then is: are we doing a favor to George Eliot and her pseudonymous peers in stamping their birth names in place of the names they chose themselves?

Read more in A Toast to Women Writers

Related:
http://uncommoncontent.blogspot.com/2013/06/jane-austens-heroines-from-extroverted.html https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1658/

The Big Bow-Wow & a Bit of Ivory

Sir Walter Scott contrasted his style of writing with that of Jane Austen: "The big Bow-Wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me". While he characterized his work as large, Jane Austen called her own small, a "little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush."

The two are married together, so to speak, by Mathew Jockers, who declares them the literary equivalent of Homo erectus, or, if you prefer, Adam and Eve,"

Read more about the humanities going Google, as one article put it in my Big Data Republic blog, The Big Bow-Wow & a Bit of Ivory