“Whatever may be the success of my stories, I shall be resolute in preserving my incognito, having observed that a nom de plume secures all the advantages without the disagreeables of reputation.” George Eliot The author Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880) is better known as George Eliot. In 2020 when the ‘Reclaim Her Name’ project published […]
Tag: English literature
Eric Blair becomes George Orwell
When we were deciding who to include in the National Library of Scotland’s current exhibition ‘Pen names’ we had to be selective. Many authors have used pen names in the United Kingdom in the period covered by the exhibition, 1800 to the present day, but we could only include forty. We decided on criteria for […]
Brigid Brophy takes an axe and gives English literature fifty whacks
The Library of St John’s College, Oxford used to be home to an edition of Spenser’s “The Faerie Queen” in which a discontented undergraduate had written his opinion of the books that he was obliged to read for his course. “First I thought Troilus and Criseyde was the most boring poem in English. Then I […]