Random Pet Peeve #423

IIRC, somebody a few years back tried to push a theory that a middle-class rural spinster like Jane Austen couldn’t possibly have written the novels attributed to her, and that they must have been the work of some much more famous (at the time), sophisticated, and married woman (I forget who the suggested suspect was - -Duchess of Devonshire or somebody?) Anyway, at least one person noted the obvious parallels to the Oxfordians, and commented that you know you’ve made it as an author when people start to argue that you couldn’t possibly have written your books.

Every so often I start to think about this kind of thing, and quite apart from the underlying snobbery, I think what bothers me is that I don’t really see how it makes practical sense to get somebody else to pretend to have written your work. I mean, there are plenty of reasons not to put your name on a work of literature, but usually it’s because the work is politically dangerous or straight-up smut. I find it harder to imagine somebody saying “o no, I won’t be taken seriously enough to make my way in politics if anyone knows I wrote these very popular and successful works of fiction” *cough BENJAMIN DISRAELI cough cough*; plus how many people know, in advance, that their novel/play is going to blow up so they’d better erase their name from it now before it’s too late and the world tries to give them credit for it?

Plus there’s the usual issue you get with conspiracy theories, of which these are a subset – would the true author really be able to go their whole life resisting the temptation to admit their involvement? And I mean really admitting it, like in a diary entry or a letter to a close friend, not, like, “planting subtle clues in the text that <strike>Paul is dead</strike> this play was actually written by somebody whose name rhymes with Rocksford.”

But OK, let’s assume for the sake of argument that I’m somebody whose family would disinherit me, or whose career would tank, if anybody, *anybody* ever suspected I had written something shocking and disgusting, like a play about Henry VI, or a witty novel about the foibles of the upper-middle class: there are centuries of examples of works that were published anonymously, or under really obvious pseudonyms. Get a literary agent if you need somebody to deliver the manuscripts and cash the cheques; picking out a real person, swearing them to secrecy, and get them to be your reverse-ghostwriter just seems like leaving your name off the title page only with extra steps, as the kids these days say.