Writing Blog Number 2

20250725 Writing scandals 2: George Eliot and the Brontës

Writing scandals 2: George Eliot and the Brontës

Schnujo is failing 2 classes asked me about writing scandals. What a great topic!
         Now, I am not going to go and research any. These are ones I know about from university study or personal interest.
         The next one is one we looked at when I did my arts degree at university.

George Eliot and the Brontës
Now, I knew about this from high school (we read the Brontë sisters), but the university shed some interesting light on things.
         The Brontë sisters are well-regarded authors and poets (Wuthering Heights is a personal favourite book), but they did not use their own names when publishing. Charlotte Brontë published as Currer Bell, Emily as Ellis and Anne as Acton. George Eliot, on the other hand, was the pen-name of Mary Ann Evans.
         So, what’s the scandal? That these four women had to use neutral-sounding or masculine names in order to be considered worthy of publication. Even Mary Shelley’s seminal Frankenstein was published anonymously at first (her name was added to the second edition, but that had more to do with who her husband was – poet Percy Bysshe Shelley – allegedly). But without that husband (and Mary Shelley’s mother was a renowned figure as well), the other four women were forced to hide their identities in order for their works to be considered worthy of publication.
         It might not be so much a scandal as a sign of the times, but the fact Mary Shelley made such a huge impact before these four women started to write, and yet the establishment still considered women not worthy of publishing says a lot more about the mores of the time and the way women were treated.
         It is said that many “anonymous” works and sayings were probably written or coined by women (my ex had a t-shirt that said, “Anonymous Was Female”), and looking at these four, it is hard to deny that possibility.