SOURCE: Wilson, Lisa M. “Female Pseudonymity in the Romantic ‘Age of Personality’: The Career of Charlotte King/Rosa Matilda/Charlotte Dacre.” European Romantic Review 9, no. 3 (1998): 393-420.

In the following essay, Wilson first reminds us of the key role that pseudonyms and ensuing literary gossip played in the marketing and sales of eighteenth-century books, and then shows how Charlotte King's cleverly self-protective double pseudonymity (Rosa Matilda/Charlotte Dacre) illustrates the continuing importance of pseudonymous authorship in the early nineteenth century.

Writing in 1809, at the height of Charlotte King's career as a pseudonymous author, Coleridge remarks that his was an “age of personality, [an] age of literary and political gossiping” when “a bashful Philalethes, or Phileleatheros is as rare on the title-pages, and among the signatures of our magazines, as a real name used to be in the days of our shy and notice-shunning grandfathers!” (The Friend, 10 [October 19, 1809]). In an...