SOURCE: Judd, Catherine A. “Male Pseudonyms and Female Authority in Victorian England.” In Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices, edited by John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten, pp. 250-68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Judd examines the practice of female authors writing under male pseudonyms in the nineteenth century and finds that their reasons for doing so were various and complex.

It has become a critical commonplace to assert that the use of male pseudonyms by Victorian women writers, especially domestic novelists, illustrates the repression and victimization of the female writer. Male pseudonyms, so the argument goes, bespeak the struggle of women writers for authority and acceptance. By shrouding the “disability” of femininity, male pseudonyms offered a way for women to overcome the prejudices of the marketplace. Patricia Lorimer Lundberg, for example, asserts that “female writers, especially those nineteenth-century novelists...