'Anonymity' Pulls Back The Authorial Masks

In a time when readers desire fast-paced information and authors vie for 15 minutes of fame, those who pen novels often become names on book covers and photographs on book jackets. Rarely do we hear of unattributed works and anonymous publications in print.

John Mullan’s “Anonymity” recalls a time when the majority of books were published anonymously. He reclaims these authors’ private lives from obscurity, awakening afresh their dreams of fame or their longing for privacy and their motives for anonymity that have been forgotten in the intervening centuries.

Mullan begins his book by seeking patterns to explain the psychology behind various author’s motives for publishing without attribution. His case studies read like a Who’s Who of English literature—from anonymous authors like Jane Austen, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and Walter Scott to those like Charles Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) and the Brontë sisters, who used psudonyms. Mullan profiled authors who concealed their identities for social propriety, literary promotion, or mere mischief.

Others, like John Locke, were forced into concealment by the necessity to avoid persecution in a time when their writings challenged the prevailing religious or political norms. The authorities of the Tudor and the Stuart eras, failing to uncover these anonymous authors, in turn executed printers.

By the 18th century, anonymity became less a matter of mortal safety and more a strategy for marketing. Readers and reviewers were left to speculate on the gender and identity for the author. Jonathan Swift, author of “Gulliver’s Travels,” for instance, went to rather elaborate means to preserve his secrecy. He arranged for the manuscript to be transcribed to disguise the handwriting, and the manuscript was later delivered by an intermediary. Mullan says that Swift’s obscurity “was a kind of self-promotion–an incitement to his first readers to discover his ‘genius’… Sometimes the last thing that an anonymous author wants is to remain unidentified.”

Anonymity returned to literature in 1996, once again as a political strategy, with the publication of “Primary Colors.” The book followed the campaign trail of Jack Stanton—governor, adulterer, and Democratic contender for the American presidency–in short, the real life story of Bill Clinton. Anonymity, in this case, implicitly suggested a narrative candor and incited a media frenzy to discover the writer. It also kept the book on the bestseller list.

These thoroughly-researched examples reveal Mullan’s keen eye for detail and his mastery at dissecting and interpreting text. Through close reading, both of the authors’ novels and correspondences, “Anonymity” offers startling insight into the lives and psychological workings of the writers profiled. Given the academic nature of Mullan’s material, he still manages to ground his literary scholarship in a relatively accessible tone.

To reduce complex literary history to straight-forward analyses, however, always carries the risk of over-simplicity. This book should be primarily read as a survey—a case study offering glimpses into the lives of the authors, and not an investigation into historical trends.

As such, the author would ideally leave the reader to guess at much of what was behind these trends. Instead, Mullan excels in offering rather disparate anecdotes, that fail to cohere as a whole. Those anecdotes, however, are enlightening stumbles for repetition.

Had this book been one-third its length, it would have guided the reader along a delightful journey through history. But 374 pages translates to being told, over and over again, that anonymous publishing may be the result of authorial mischief, publicity-seeking, or genuine need for safety.

In the epilogue, Mullan finally admits that no bigger themes may be discovered in the history of anonymity. In the all-too-short conclusion, he writes that this book “is a book about the importance of authors, and about how and why readers need them.”

The author, in a sense, is a public entity that is kept alive by our imagination. The true anonymity is not the lack of names on a book cover, but being forgotten by history, being generalized into a mere name. John Mullan’s book, then, rescues the authors from anonymity by giving readers their life’s story, their reasons for concealment. This, I think, is the true treasure in Mullan’s book.