ABSTRACT
Most studies approach the problem of anonymity from the perspective of one of two general questions: why did an individual author publish anonymously in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and what role did anonymous publication play in the literature market overall? To answer the first question, researchers turn to the prefaces of anonymous works and, when the author of those works is identifiable, to collections of letters and journals, if those materials are available. As a result, much scholarly work on anonymous practice focuses on specific, individual authors, from Fanny Burney to Charlotte Brontë, rather than on groups of anonymous writers.1 However, as Paula Feldman notes, these individual author studies create a situation in which “the exception has been mistaken for the rule”; and a specific author’s reasons for publishing anonymously become a generalization by which to understand anonymous publication more widely in the period (“Women” 48). This is particularly true in discussions of the relationship between anonymity and gender: one author’s perspective on the market becomes the perspective of all authors, and one female author’s practice becomes the practice of all females.
