Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseydonyms

Synopsis
A series of essays detailing the lives of various authors who used pseudonyms.


My thoughts
What can you tell from a name? Not a whole lot. From my full name, you could guess my gender and a fraction of my ethnicity, but you probably couldn't figure out my age and you definitely couldn't figure out my political persuasion, sexual orientation, or any of the other things that make me me. (Oh, um, Clio is not my real name; I just chose it because Clio was the Greek muse of history and I was a history major in college.)

I picked this book up because I've always been fascinated by people who use aliases, the reasons they use them, and the reasons they choose the names they do. The profiled authors range from the ones I'd read (the Brontes) to the ones I've been meaning to read (Sylvia Plath) to the ones I've never heard of (Henry Green), and their reasons for choosing alternate identities range from the standard (women wanting to publish in a male-dominated field) to the bizarre (Fernando Pessoa seemed to actually inhabit each of his names). As mini-biographies they're all very interesting; as profiles of pen names, some are more successful than others. In the essay on Georges Simenon, his noms de plume seem like a footnote; they disappear halfway through.

The essays that held my attention best were the ones that profiled authors who had unconventional reasons for disguising their identities. I knew O. Henry's parents hadn't actually named him O. Henry, but I didn't realize he was a convicted felon who went to great lengths to hide his criminal record from his daughter. And then there was Fernando Pessoa, who not only made up dozens of alternate names but created completely separate identities with different moods, interests, and writing styles. (This reminded me of one of the spies in Operation Mincemeat, who made up an intricate network of false contacts and kept the Nazis fooled for years.)

Nom de Plume comes full circle very neatly. It starts with the Bronte sisters, George Sand, and George Eliot, who created fictional male alter egos because the prevailing opinion of the time was that women couldn't write as well as men. It ends with Pauline Réage, who many people (falsely) suspected to be a man simply because they assumed a woman couldn't write good erotic fiction. (Interestingly, Réage wrote Histoire d'O as a love letter to her partner and didn't initially intend for it to be published.)

Bottom line
I thoroughly enjoyed the book, but it seems like it would appeal to a very narrow audience. My advice? Don't miss the essays on Mark Twain, O. Henry, and Fernando Pessoa. Skim the ones on authors you've read or are interested in. Skip the rest.

Fine print
Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms, by Carmela Ciuraru
Genre: Biography
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library