This week we are
going to try something different and let you write the blog post. March is Women’s
History Month, and we would like to hear some interesting facts about female
authors. Please post your comments to this blog or, if you have accessed it
through IWC’s Facebook feed, you can reply there. We will then add your Facebook
comments to this post.
Here’s something
to start it off.
From Kathryn
Page Camp: George Eliot was one of my favorite authors when I was in high
school and college. Mary Ann Evans said that she used a male pen name to ensure
that she was taken seriously. While a lot of women used their own names during
that time (the 1850s through the 1870s), they were all romance writers, and
Mary Ann wanted to escape the stereotype. But in recent years I learned there
may have been another reason for the pen name. She lived with a married man (no,
he wasn’t married to her) and may have wanted to create a wall between her
reputation as a writer and her private life.
Nice post, Kathryn!
ReplyDeleteNumerous female authors used a male pseudonym simply to GET published!
When I think of a woman not being taken seriously as a writer, one name that comes to mind is Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," was based upon true life experience, in which she was given the "rest cure" for a nervous breakdown and told that she shouldn't write. Specifically, her doctor's solemn advice, according to Perkins Gilman was to "'live as domestic a life as far as possible,' to 'have but two hours' intellectual life a day,' and 'never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again' as long as [she] lived. This was in 1887." (From Gilman's "Why I Wrote 'The Yellow Wallpaper' http://csivc.csi.cuny.edu/history/files/lavender/whyyw.html)
Janine Harrison