The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century Edited by J. Robert Griffin * THE FACES OF ANONYMITY © Robert J. Griffin, 2003 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2003 978-0-312-29530-1 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN"" 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin's Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan<~> is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-63566-5 ISBN 978-1-137-11109-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-11109-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The faces of anonymity: anonymous and pseudonymous publications from the sixteenth to the twentieth century/edited by Robert J. Griffin p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1.Anonymous writings, English-History and criticism. 2. English literature--History and criticism. 3. Anonyms and pseudonyms, English-History. 4. Authorship-History. I. Griffin, Robert J. (Robert john), 1950- PR121.F33 2003 820.9-dc21 2002072830 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India First edition: january, 2003 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Transferred to Digital Printing 2011 CONTENTS Priface Vll Notes on Contributors lX Introduction Robert]. Griffin 1 Chapter One Rehearsing the Absent Name: Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets Through Anonymity 19 Marcy L. North Chapter Two Death of an Author: Constructions of Pseudonymity in the Battle of the Books 39 Kristine Louise Haugen Chapter Three " 'By a Lady': The Mask of the Feminine in Restoration, Early Eighteenth-Century Print Culture " 63 Margaret]. M. Ezell Chapter Four The Author's Queer Clothes: Anonymity, Sex(uality), and The Travels and Adventures cif Mademoiselle de Richelieu 81 Susan S. Lanser Chapter Five Possible Gustavus Vassal Olaudah Equiano Attributions 103 Vincent Carretta V! Contents Chapter Six The Anonymous Novel in Britain and Ireland, 17 50-1830 141 James Raven Chapter Seven Nothing's Namelessness: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein 167 Susan Eilenberg Chapter Eight The Coauthored Pseudonym: Two Women Named Michael Field 193 Holly A. Laird Chapter Nine From Ghostwriter to Typewriter: Delegating Authority at Fin de Siecle 211 Leah Price Chapter Ten "A Poet May Not Exist": Mock-Hoaxes and the Construction of National Identity 233 Brian McHale Index 253 PREFACE My interest in anonymity was first aroused when I noticed that nearly every book or poem I was preparing for teaching in class was originally published anonymously or pseudonymously. When I began to look into it more systematically, it became clear how immense the subject was, for it seemed to take in nearly every author. That realization quickly led to the decision to pursue a track parallel to my plans for a monograph on anonymity and authorship by soliciting scholars in different periods to write essays drawing on their expertise. This volume is the fruit of that initiative. In the planning stages I received invaluable advice from Josie Dixon and from my colleagues at Poetics Today, Meir Sternberg, Brian McHale, and Orly Lubin. While working on this project, my research was enabled by grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Israel Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Huntington Library, the William Andrews Clark Library, the Lewis Walpole Library, and the Folger Library. It is impossible to say how grateful I am for this support. I have also learned much from the staffs of these great libraries. I have received assistance of all kinds from very many people, more than I can name. Nonetheless, I wish to name a few: Leo Damrosch, Frances Ferguson, Joe Litvak, Helen Deutsch, Sonia Hofkosh, Lars Engle, David Kastan, Ronald Paulson, Annabel Patterson, Ruth Yeazell, Geoffrey Hartman, Margaret Ezell, Paul Fry, Roy Ritchie, Mary Robertson, Anna Malicka, Richard G. Williams, Cyndia Glegg, Werner Sollors, and Charles H. Rowell. I thank the editors of New Literary History for permission to reprint in my Introduction material that first appeared in their journal. NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Vincent Carretta is Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. His publications include "The Snarling Muse": Verbal and Visual Satire from Pope to Churchill (1983); George III and the Satirists from Hogarth to Byron (1990); ed., The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings by Olaudah Equiano (1995); ed., Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century (1996); ed., Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African (1998); ed., Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery and Other Writings by Quobna Ottobah Cugoano (1999); The Complete Writings of Phyllis Wheatley (2001); and coed., with Philip Gould, Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic (2001). Susan Eilenberg is an Associate Professor of English at SUNY-Buffalo and the author of Strange Power of Speech: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Literary Possession (Oxford, 1992). She is currently writing on Milton and quantifiability, and is a regular contributor to The London Review of Books. Margaret]. M.'Ezell is the John Paul Abbott Professor ofLiberalArts at Texas A&M University. She is the author of The Patriarch's Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family (1987), Writing Women's Literary History (1993), Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (1999), the editor of The Poems and Prose of Mary, Lady Chudleigh (1993), and the co-editor, with Kathleen O'Keeffe, of CulturalArt!focts and the Production of Meaning (1994). Robert J. Griffin is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at Tel Aviv University, and the Associate Editor of Poetics Today. Wordsworth's Pope: A Study in Literary Historiography was published by Cambridge University Press in 1995. He is currently completing a book-length study of the cultural history and poetics of anonymity, 1700-1830. X Notes on Contributors Kristine Louise Haugen recently completed a dissertation at Princeton on Richard Bentley's philology and criticism, and has pub lished articles on Richard Hurd, Ossian, seventeenth-century Oxford, and on sixteenth-century pedagogy. She has received Mellon, Javits, and Whiting fellowships, and is now a Frances Yates Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Warburg Institute in London. Holly A. Laird, Professor and Chair of the Department of English at the University ofTulsa, is Editor of Tulsa Studies in Women5 Literature and a past president of the Council ofEditors ofLearnedJournals. Her book, Women Coauthors, which focuses on late nineteenth-century to contem porary women literary collaborators, was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2000. Susan S. Lanser is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Chair ofWomen's Studies at the Brandeis University. She is the author of The Narrative Act (1981), Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (1992), and the co-editor of Women Critics: An Anthology 166{)-1820 (1995) and the Broadview edition of Helen Maria Williams's Letter from France (2001). She is currently at work on a book-length study of changing constructions of sapphism in the long eighteenth century. Brian McHale is Professor of English at The Ohio State University, and co-editor of Poetics Today. He is the author of Postmodernist Fiction (1987), Constructing Postmodernism (1992), and of numerous articles on twentieth century fiction, postmodernist poetry, and narratology. He is currently completing a book-length study of the postmodernist long poem. Marcy L. North is Assistant Professor of English at Florida State University. She has published articles on early modern anonymity, and her book, The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures cif Discretion in Tudor-Stuart England, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. Leah Price is Professor of English at Harvard University. She is the author of The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot (2000) and a regular contributor to the London Review cif Books; she is currently working on two book projects, Novels and Knowledge in the First Information Age and The Secretarial Imagination, as well as an anthology called Victorian Readers: A Reader. James Raven is Reader in Cultural and Social History in the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford. He is the author of numerous books and articles on the history NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS XI of British, European and North American literary, publishing and communications history, including most recently The English Novel, 1770-1829, 2 vols., coedited (Oxford University Press, 2000) and English Books and American Customers (University of South Carolina Press, 2002). INTRODUCTION Robert J Griffin This collection of ten original essays is, as far as I am aware, the first book of its kind to address the topic of anonymous and pseudonymous pub lication. Literary studies exhibit a curious reluctance to acknowledge that most of the literature ever published appeared either without the author's name or under a fictive name. We have very few statistics, but the ones provided by James Raven in his essay for this volume are quite astounding. According to Raven, over 80 percent of all novels published in Britain between 1750 and 1790 were published anonymously. During the 1790s, the amount fell to 62 percent, and to less than 50 percent in the first decade of the nineteenth century. But during the 1820s it rose again to almost 80 percent. Given the sheer amount of unsigned and pseudo-signed publication from antiquity to the present, however, my first realization, as editor, was that no book on this topic could ade quately survey such a vast field, for it appears that there are very few authors who did not resort to anonymity or pseudonymity at least once in their careers.1 The focus on England (with one exception), and pri marily on literary texts such as poems, novels, and essays rather than printed matter generally, is therefore purely pragmatic. The chronologi cal field delimited, with concentrations in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, runs parallel to traditional literary history's account of the rise of the professional author. Topics covered are genre, gender, nationalism, authorial cross-dressing, collaboration and co authorship, ghostwriting, hoaxes, attribution, manuscripts, and problems of reading. "Anonymous" is generally understood as a text whose author is not identified on the title page. Pseudonymity is therefore a subset of anonymity; the important fact in both cases is that the legal name of the