It’s liberating for writers to use a female pseudonym

In that great library in the sky, do you suppose Currer Bell gave George Eliot a high five this morning upon hearing the news that male novelists are adopting pseudonyms to attract female readers? Certainly, Charlotte Brontë and Mary Ann Evans could be forgiven for feeling a teensy bit vindicated. Both great writers used masculine nom de plumes so that their novels, Jane Eyre and Middlemarch among them, might be taken seriously. Brontë was actually warned that “literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life”.

Well, the tables have turned as publishers respond to the fact that women buy most novels, and women prefer to read female writers, just as men seem to feel more comfortable with male authors.

The trend is most apparent in psychological thrillers, where the success of writers such as Gillian “Gone Girl” Flynn has seen authors like Sean Thomas unsex himself to become SK Tremayne. The unambiguously butch Tony Strong is now the more soothing JP Delaney.

Delaney makes a good point when he says that a pseudonym has not changed the way he writes, but it has “affected the way people read me”. He feels readers may find it more palatable for an author they believe to be a woman to inflict horrors upon female characters.

As a woman, I sense that’s true – how sick are we of male TV dramatists using rape as a plot device? – but as a novelist it dismays me. Madame Bovary, one of the greatest novels about a female character, would not read better if its author was called Gussy Flaubert. Mary Shelley managed to create Frankenstein despite having a womb. In the kingdom of the imagination, men and women can roam freely without being locked into the perspective of their sex. Well, that’s the ideal anyway. Next week, just to ring the changes, this column will be written by Alan Pearson.