Literary Criticism: Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature By John Mullan Faber & Faber, 374 pp. £17.99 All books have authors but some have no author's name, while others have a false name, a pseudonym. The title of John Mullan's marvellous new book, Anonymity, suggests that it is a study of only the former, but actually it is as much a study of authors who published books with a bogus name on the title page, designed to annoy or mislead or wrong-foot or intrigue the reader, as it is a study of authors who published books with a blank where their name should have been.
This is a subject of enormous richness and variety as the reasons for anonymity, or pseudonymity, are as varied as the authors who have practised these subterfuges: Mullan, however, who has been collecting material for years, gives a fine and readable account of this subject in less than 300 pages.
The story starts with anonymous writing: nowadays it's mostly graffiti artists and sex bloggers who are anonymous, but in the middle ages, as Mullan reminds us, it was everywhere. Thus Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, like most medieval literature, had no named authors because the Christian scribes disdained names: they smacked of vanity.
THE USE OF the word "anonymous" began in earnest in the 16th century, with the arrival of print. It had two drivers - self-protection and modesty - and with it came the pattern that was to be endlessly repeated, of anonymity (and later pseudonymity when it became more widespread) triggering feverish speculation among readers, culminating (usually) with the author's name becoming known. Then, in the 18th century, the already complicated process became even more difficult with the arrival of teasing or mischievous anonymity.
Consider this: Jonathan Swift had part of Gulliver's Travels transcribed in another man's handwriting and dropped (with no name attached) by an intermediary at the publisher Benjamin Motte's house accompanied by a letter, written by Swift but copied out by John Gay, telling Motte he should either return the sample or pay £200 "to the hand from whence you receive this". Motte paid and received the balance of the manuscript.
A few days later, Motte met Swift's friend and likely co-conspirator, Alexander Pope, who, hearing Motte's account, pretended to be as mystified as the publisher, all of which he duly reported to Swift in Dublin by letter. The secret of the Dean's authorship was a great jape enjoyed by Swift's circle to start, and later, because the last thing Swift wanted was to remain unidentified as the writer of Gulliver's Travels, by readers who enjoyed the game of maintaining the fiction of anonymity as much as he did. Henrietta Howard, for example, lady-in-waiting to the Princess of Wales, signed her letters to Swift "Yahoo", and in one of his replies Swift enclosed "the crown of Lilliput", saying "I found it in . . . my . . . pockett", having "by mistake brought it . . . to England". He signed this letter "Lemuel Gulliver".
The 18th century also saw the flowering of pseudonymity, of men pretending to write as women for instance, with Daniel Defoe producing two of the best feminine memoirs, Moll Flanders and Roxana. Pseudonymity was essential if it was to be believed the authors were women, but there was another reason for Defoe leaving his name off the title page and allowing readers to believe real women had written these books. He'd been pilloried and imprisoned for earlier works and this was an experience he was anxious not to repeat; thus self-protection and aesthetics converged here.
MIRRORING MEN WRITING as women, there were also women writing as men. This tradition had its roots in modesty, and for the Brontë sisters, for example, this was certainly why they used pseudonyms when they began publishing. However, for Charlotte, the pseudonym became a nom de guerre that allowed her to say what she couldn't under her own name. Indeed, "Currer Bell" was so important she maintained the fiction even after her name became known, and it wasn't until Elizabeth Gaskell's posthumous The Life of Charlotte Brontë that Currer formally became Charlotte.
Anonymity, in the classic sense of no name being attached, was also the norm in reviewing in the 18th and 19th centuries (and at the Times Literary Supplement until 1974), on the grounds that only the unnamed reviewer was free to speak the truth. Of course, the practice also meant reviewers could say what they wouldn't have dared to say if their names were given. For instance, in 1830 a glowing review of William Godwin's novel Cloudesley appeared in Blackwood's Magazine, written by his daughter, Mary Shelley, but because it was anonymous no reader could know who'd written it. George Eliot, though, used anonymity to disguise an even greater partiality: in her review of GH Lewes's Life and Works of Goethe (1855) she lavishly praised the author, giving no hint they were lovers, or that she had helped him to compose the book in question. Against this, Anthony Burgess reviewing his own novel One Hand Clapping (published under the pseudonym Joseph Kell) hardly seems to constitute an offence at all.
IN THE 20TH century, anonymity and pseudonymity atrophied. The "conventions of genteel reticence about making your name public" had gone and "the business of selling authors had become inextricable from the business of selling books". There were exceptions: Eric Blair published as George Orwell to escape his Etonian past; Sylvia Plath published The Bell Jar (1963) as Victoria Lucas to evade maternal censure; and Doris Lessing published a couple of novels in the 1980s as Jane Somers to escape her sci-fi reputation. But pseudonyms today are less about hiding than allowing authors to enjoy multiple personalities: thus it is common knowledge Julian Barnes writes detective fiction as Dan Kavanagh and Ruth Rendell also publishes as Barbara Vine. As for classic anonymity, texts with no name, nowadays it's ex-workers from the sex industry that mostly pen these.
As no-one has previously written a brief history of literary anonymity and pseudonymity in English letters, this is a genuinely novel work. It is also an important book because of what Mullan says about the culture. In his 1967 essay The Death of the Author Roland Barthes complains that "explanation of . . . work is still sought in the person of its producer". In other words, pesky readers want an author as a short cut to interpretation. But, as Mullan shows, with anonymity and pseudonymity, it was ever thus and always will be, because readers always lust for an author to come attached to a work precisely because an author is such an aid to interpretation, and, as a biased author, I'm all for that.
Carlo Gébler is an author. My Father's Watch, co-authored with Patrick Maguire about the latter's wrongful conviction for handling nitroglycerine following the Guildford pub bombings of 1974, will be published in the spring