1:21 AM
I think
this twitter thread by Dr. Sam Hirst is a good breakdown of where the "reclaim her name" concept makes a break from good intentions and instead the implementation perpetuates a lot of really condescending historical revision.
(Starting with assuming all those people didn't want to use a pen name. Which it's clear many of them did; eg Sui Sin Far.)
(Sui Sin Far was a Chinese American whose birth name was very American. She chose to write under a Chinese name to reinforce the personal experiences she was writing about, and it's not even a notably masculine name, so what's she doing in that collection? "real name" indeed)
And that's before getting into gender issues the "project" ignores. Like, seriously, do we really think George Sand wanted to be published under a different name?
If somebody published under a particular name, I think it'd be more respectful to assume they chose it deliberately and for good reason and only re-publish under a different name if there's, like, some diary entry we can point to where they bemoan having been forced to use the wrong name.
Author names are very personal and it's just... weird... to assume nobody wants to use them.
And yeah, one of the reasons George Eliot chose that name was probably because of gender bias around certain kinds of writing. But she also chose it just to separate one of her kinds of writing from another (like Ursula Vernon publishes kid's stuff under Vernon, and adult stuff under Kingfisher--it's not a secret, it's branding!).
AND Eliot's chosen author name is a tribute to her lover; pen names mean things and are massively important parts of a person's identity even/especially when the choice to use one wasn't entirely born of internal pressures.
"Reclaim her name" is a well-meaning premise but it's been implemented with little research, thought, or care, based on the assumption that the project runners know more about the authors' wishes than the authors themselves.
I'd love to see a similar project that does the work to actually find the authors who really WOULD have written under other names if given the opportunity. But even then, I think care should be taken not to downplay the choices the authors made.
