Why do feminists want to force George Eliot back into a crinoline?

The #Reclaimhername collection is republishing 25 well-known works under the real names of the women who wrote them, discarding their authors’ male pseudonyms, to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Women’s Prize for Fiction. According to novelist Kate Mosse, a co-founder of the prize, this will empower women, “igniting conversations and ensuring they get the recognition they deserve”.

“Igniting conversation” has become the default defence for bad ideas, such as defacing even the most distinguished statue – as in: “They weren’t graffitiing Winston Churchill, they were sparking a conversation about empire.” Though well-intentioned, #Reclaimhername is clunky revisionism masquerading as feminism.

Indiscriminate refeminising obscures the authors’ varied motives for adopting male pseudonyms; for some, the economic necessity of publication, for others, a matter of choice – or both. George Eliot primarily wished to separate her work from her scandalous domestic set-up (cohabitation with a married man in Victorian England), but she also enjoyed the sound of her pen-name, “a good mouth-filling, easily pronounced word”. Even the compulsion to adopt male names tells us much about the age.

For George Sand (Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin) and Vernon Lee (novelist Violet Paget), male monikers reflected their taste for outraging bourgeois sensibilities and transgressing the boundaries set down for women. Both regularly dressed à la garçonne, relishing the freedom male clothes offered. Who are we to drag them into the daylight, forced back into crinolines and bonnets?

Eliot’s renaming seems particularly incoherent given her solemn, nearfeature doctrinaire approach to her craft. In the essay Silly Novels by Lady Novelists, she brilliantly (if brutally) skewers the work of many female contemporaries as shallow and simplistic. For Eliot, the imaginary Lady Novelist “mistakes vagueness for depth, bombast for eloquence, and affectation for originality… struts on one page, rolls her eyes on another, grimaces in a third, and is hysterical in a fourth”. Forcing a novelist who so consciously distanced herself from other female writers into the retroactive mould of Nuneaton’s own Mary Ann Evans does little to elevate her. It is the literary equivalent of “outing” someone against their will.

Women, past and present, have adopted male personas for diverse reasons. Most recently, J K Rowling chose the alias Robert Galbraith to experience “unvarnished” critical reaction, untainted by Harry Potter hype. Secondguessing their motives is not just historically illiterate, it undermines female agency, as too much contemporary feminism does.

Eliot’s readers have long lamented her heroines’ unsatisfactory endings; Maggie Tulliver’s drowning in the River Floss, Dorothea Brooke’s underwhelming marriage to Will Ladislaw, or Adam Bede’s Dinah Morris, meekly abandoning her sermons on the green when the Methodist Church forbids women to preach. Yet they also reflect the realities of that era – something a tough-minded realist like Eliot was keen to achieve. It may disappoint feminists, but attempting to redact literary history is no more natural than rewriting The Mill on the Floss to spare Maggie her watery demise.