What’s in a Name? Erasing women writers in the name of uplifting them: It is easy to get caught in the trap of historical revisionism when it comes to women writers, but this revisionism is rarely along progressive lines - despite its claims. Instead, it is a conservative reimagining of women struggling to survive in a man’s world that erases the ( Read more... )

I think all that can be said about the creepy journo who outed (or did he) the writer known as Elena Ferrante has probably been said.
I think I have remarked, more than once, on that problematic elision from 'private' to 'secret': as in (to think of one instance) a 'secret tunnel' that was not actually secret: but it was private and not open to all ( Read more... )

Interesting article about internet interaction that actually gets the anonymous/pseudonymous distinction. And additional major plus points for citing research that finds that pseudonymity is Not A Bad Thing.

This reminded me that I spotted something in the paper yesterday going WOEZ and claiming that in Ye Olden Dayez, people signed their official ( Read more... )

Thinking about the recent naming and shaming of an online scumbag, and the fact that apparently there are people out there who think that breaking the Code of Online Anonymity is far worse than violating the privacy of random (female) individuals...

Are we not, my dearios, reminded somewhat of the Schoolboy Code of Honour, whereby it was Not Done ( Read more... )

Yestreen was at a very good, if somewhat intense and perhaps rather too crammed, afternoon symposium on biography and its writing.

Just one thing that came up in a panel discussion jarred me, which was the claim that these days everybody's life is all over the net.

I feel that the people who make this claim are actually people who don't spend that ( Read more... )

Unless you count 'one, two, many', you (second letter down) really can't get away with a line like
'the Malthus theorem was disproved many centuries ago'.

Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population was first published in 1798.

I don't think that there can be many centuries of refutation of a text that's 213 years old.

I don't even think ( Read more... )

Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (because identifiably female names don't get taken seriously by publishers)

George Eliot (because Marion Evans has acquired a certain reputation that might militate against her fiction being considered on its merits)

Rebecca West (*It's complicated* - but to do with Cicely Fairfield's association with the scandalous ( Read more... )