20 Women Who Hid Their Names And Became Famous Anyway

One of the foundational texts of science fiction, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, was first published anonymously on January 1, 1818. Imagine writing Frankenstein and not even getting your name on the cover! Mary’s name wasn’t printed on the book until the second edition in 1823, five years later. In the meantime, contemporary reviewers and major periodicals attributed the novel to her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.

I personally believe that Little Women could only be written by a woman. But before Louisa May Alcott wrote the classic novel, she was writing what she herself called “blood-and-thunder” stories in the 1860s. Under the pseudonym A.M. Barnard, works such as Behind a Mask followed cunning female characters who outwitted wealthy, powerful men—a rather different world from the March sisters! Alcott’s darker side was rediscovered in the 1940s, when literary scholars Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern revealed that she had written these stories.

Charlotte Brontë released Jane Eyre in October 1847 under the sexually ambiguous name Currer Bell, since publishing under her own name likely would have led critics to dismiss the novel because of the assertive and emotionally complex nature of the heroine. The pseudonym gave the novel an opportunity to be judged on its own merits, at least!

When Sense and Sensibility was published in 1811, Jane Austen’s name was nowhere on it. Instead, the novel was simply credited as being written: “By a Lady.” It explored the financial precarity of women in Regency England, when marriage could determine a woman’s economic future. Austen’s subsequent novels were credited to “the Author of Sense and Sensibility,” which feels almost comically committed to keeping her name off the page. It was only after Austen’s death in 1817 that readers learned who the author actually was.

Mary Ann Evans published Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede in 1857 and 1859 under the male pseudonym George Eliot. She did this largely to prevent critics from dismissing the work of a female novelist as just another romance and to have the psychological realism and moral complexity of her novels taken seriously. In other words, Evans wanted critics to read the books before deciding what a woman was supposedly capable of writing.

When Wuthering Heights was published in 1847, Emily Brontë used the male-coded pseudonym Ellis Bell instead of her real name. In response to the novel’s violence and lack of moralizing, some contemporary reviewers assumed that Ellis Bell really was a man because surely a woman couldn’t have written something so brutal! Emily maintained the pseudonym until her death in December 1848, before her identity and gender became widely known to the public.

In 1932, historian Charles Warren corrected the nineteenth-century misattribution of the influential pamphlet Observations on the New Constitution to American politician Elbridge Gerry. Published in 1788, the pamphlet was actually written by political writer Mercy Otis Warren under the pseudonym “A Columbian Patriot.” It argued that the proposed Constitution of the United States did not sufficiently protect individual liberties. Her essay helped convince state ratifying conventions to pressure Congress to adopt the Bill of Rights.

During the late 1880s, journalist and civil rights activist Ida B. Wells published her writings under the name “Iola” in Black church publications and the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight. Her writings argued against lynching, railway segregation, and mob violence, and helped mobilize economic boycotts organized by Black communities. Her better-known anti-lynching pamphlet Southern Horrors was published under her own name. In May 1892, a white mob destroyed her printing press.

Anne Brontë’s novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, published in June 1848, told the story of a woman who escaped an abusive alcoholic husband to protect her son. Under the coverture law of the 1840s, a woman in such circumstances had no legal means of retaining her property or securing custody of her son. Published under the pen name Acton Bell, the book prompted widespread discussion about the rights of married women, and its first printing sold out quickly.

Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Men in only three weeks in December 1790, a work much less well known today than A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published two years later under her name and still widely remembered. Rights of Men was published anonymously as a response to British politician Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Its first edition sold out before the second edition came out, this time bearing Wollstonecraft’s name.

George Sand, the male pen name that Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin assumed when she published her first novel, Indiana, in 1832, was more than just a literary disguise. Between March and May of 1848, Sand wrote in secret the bulletins of the provisional ministry’s government propaganda. Her republican prose profoundly influenced popular sentiment during the 1848 French Revolution. She wrote as the mouthpiece of a provisional government, without an official title.

Marie-Jeanne Roland used her husband’s identity to get around revolutionary France’s legal prohibition against women holding public office. She ghostwrote the June 1792 letter, which, published under her husband’s name as Minister of the Interior, called on Louis XVI to obey the Constitution. The letter helped turn Girondin and popular opinion against the monarchy. Marie-Jeanne Roland was executed in November 1793.

Delarivier Manley’s anonymously published The New Atalantis, a roman à clef describing the alleged corruption of the Whig politicians in power, damaged the Whig party’s credibility and in some ways facilitated the Tory landslide of the 1710 election. Delarivier Manley was arrested in October 1709 for libel, but refused to divulge any Tory associates.

English novelist Elizabeth Gaskell sent her first novel to publisher Chapman & Hall anonymously. It was published in October 1848 as Mary Barton, with no author’s name attached. The novel offered a sympathetic account of working-class poverty and the Chartist labor movement, set in industrial Manchester. In doing so, Gaskell confronted Victorian middle-class readers with the conditions behind urban labor unrest.

Between 1795 and 1798, Hannah More anonymously (or under the initial ‘Z.’ no less) published the Cheap Repository Tracts, moral tales which were calculated to stem the tide of French revolutionary radicalism among the working classes of Britain. Over two million copies were sold in just two years.

Jane Marcet’s Conversations on Political Economy won high praise from Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, and Jean-Baptiste Say. First published anonymously in 1816 and credited only to ‘the Author of Conversations on Chemistry,’ the book was a best-seller in Europe, with at least 14 editions published. It explained the thoughts of Adam Smith and Ricardo in the form of conversations between a tutor and student for the layperson to understand.

During her four years (1900–1904) as editor of The Colored American Magazine, Black writer and journalist Pauline Hopkins also published under the pseudonym Sarah A. Allen, her mother’s maiden name. Her writings included political fiction and biographical sketches. Using a pseudonym allowed Hopkins to fill the journal’s pages with anti-Jim Crow arguments and stories promoting Black advancement without having her own name appear on piece after piece.

Edith Maude Eaton, a writer of Chinese and English heritage who could have passed as white, instead wrote during the 1890s as Sui Sin Far, a pen name often translated as “Water Lily.” Her short stories spoke up for Chinese immigrants at a time when the Chinese Exclusion Act and widespread anti-Chinese racism shaped their lives in North America. These stories were later compiled into Mrs. Spring Fragrance, published in 1912.

In 1883, South African writer Olive Schreiner published The Story of an African Farm in London under the male pen name Ralph Iron. Its heroine, Lyndall, challenged Victorian ideas about marriage, religion, and female independence—hardly quiet topics for the time. The novel had a profound cultural impact and helped spur the spread of the “New Woman” archetype, representing women who challenged traditional expectations, over the following decades.

British writer Violet Paget used the name Vernon Lee for all her publications, from her first book in 1878 to her controversial pacifist treatise Satan the Waster in 1920. In the latter, she challenged rising nationalism and lamented the victims of World War I, a position that wasn’t exactly popular in postwar Britain. As a result of the publication, Paget was socially ostracized in Britain.

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