Eliot/Evans and Queen's "Genders and Authors"

In Mary Queen’s article “Genders and Authors,” she discusses how the masculinized notions of publishing and authorship affected women in the early nineteenth century to the extent that they had to use male pen names “in order to authorize themselves into being.” In other words “women often had to become complicit” in their own denial of being an “authority.” Since I had taken Dr. Miriam Mara’s British fiction class last spring, this section of the reading resonated with me.

In her class, she assigned George Eliot’s “A Mill on the Floss.” At the time I had neither read nor knew anything of the work of Eliot, and so was shocked to learn that Eliot was the pen name for a woman named Mary Anne (or Mary Ann, or sometimes Marian) Evans. Needless to say, this revelation changed the way I felt about the book. Once I knew the truth, I recall feeling like Evans had had an opportunity to showcase women differently, and in a way other than what the strict (read: repressed) Victorian attitudes suggested were socially acceptable, but squandered that chance. I felt a queer sense of betrayal; the women publishing at the time were trailblazing, being subversive, and I couldn’t (and truthfully still cant) why they didn’t push the boundaries with their characterizations of women. True, the Victorians weren’t going to publish anything with even a whiff of scandalous behavior, and I suppose I really can’t judge since I wasn’t there, but that still rankles to this day.

The in class discussion led to my questioning why they (the publishers) were still using her male pen name instead of her given female name. There are many cases, i.e. the Bronte sisters, where previous male pen names have been replaced by the correct female author’s name. But that was apparently not the case with Evans, as her true name appeared nowhere on my copy, or any other student’s copy, of the text. Dr. Mara suggested that perhaps it had to do with the slight mystery of her true name, or at least the spelling of her true name, as mentioned above. I remember googling it when I got home, thinking I would find an answer fairly quickly, but it didn’t work out that way. It’s still a mystery, especially since she has been dead long enough for aspects of copyright with regards to author name to have lapsed. Conundrum.

Now, having read Queen’s article and having done some reflection on my thoughts from Dr. Mara’s class, its possible Evans, despite being both motivated or passionate about writing to dedicate herself to it and being a good enough writer to be published, still clung to the ideals of her time, backwards though they are.