Female pseudonyms
Sir, – J. C. asks (NB, February 16) if any male writers have used female pseudonyms apart from O. H. Mavor as “Mary Henderson”. William Sharpe (“Fiona Macleod”) springs to mind, while recent romantic novelists include Ian Blair (“Emma Blair”), Hugh C. Rae (“Jessica Stirling”) and Roger Sanderson (“Jill Sanderson”). L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, wrote stories for girls as “Edith Van Dyne”, while one of John Creasey’s pseudonyms was “Margaret Cooke” and the Canadian author John Glassco was published as “Sylvia Bayer”.
French writers have gone in for female names. Voltaire appeared in print as “Une belle dame” and “Catherine Vadé”, while in 1825 Mérimée published six plays set in Spain as Le Théâtre de Clara Gazul, complete with a fetching frontispiece of the author in female garb.
When, in 1853, the Russian journal Panteon rejected a poetic contribution from the historical novelist G. P. Danilevsky (1829–90), he waited a few weeks, then submitted a longish poem entitled “A Woman’s Advocacy” with the following covering letter:
Dear Sir, I am just a 16-year-old girl living in the depths of the country. I have educated myself by studying and love books. It suddently occurred to me to send you an example of my efforts. I have worked hard and thought much over the enclosed poem, which I have several times rewritten. A teacher friend of mine, who knows about literature and has been to St Petersburg, tells me that you are actively encouraging women to try their hand in writing. That spurred me even more to send you my composition. I now submit it for your verdict. Please look favourably on a humble 16-year-old poetess. With the greatest respect, Evgeniya Sarafonova. P. S. No need to reply. If you print it, I shall be delighted. If you reject it, I shall suffer in silence.
The female charm worked. The journal published an extract from the poem with the promise of more to come and soon after received another letter.
I cried with joy. Thank you, thank you. I will write more when I have recovered a little. Meanwhile, if possible, could you please send some sort of payment. I am a girl who is not all that well off.
The fee duly arrived, and the poem now regularly appears in Danilevsky’s complete works.
ADRIAN ROOM
12 High Street, St Martin’s, Stamford.
Science and religion
Sir, – Steven Weinberg (Letters, February 14) reduces Newtonianism to Newton’s laws; but why was Sir Isaac’s religion somehow less Newtonian than his science? What Weinberg takes to be the true Newton is merely what interests him most about the man, which is like saying bananas are the true fruit because they are my favourite. And his Manichean parable of good atheists promoting science against bad believers won’t wash: Newton’s science gained ground in England mainly with the support of liberal Protestants who felt it would buttress their cause. As John Cadden helpfully notes, science and religion were symbiotic, not locked in conflict down the ages.
ALEX DRACE-FRANCIS
School of History, University of Liverpool, 9 Abercromby Square, Liverpool.
Sir, – In his letter of February 2, Steven Weinberg responds to critical remarks made by several correspondents following his review of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion. Weinberg gives what amounts to a summary of the scientific method with the implication that it is the only way of arriving at the knowledge of reality and the discovery of “truth”. According to Weinberg’s thesis, theology, unlike biology, does not settle arguments or correct errors by way of “reason and experiment”. This conclusion also seems to support his statement that theology does not “deal with anything real”.
However, much the same can be said of the study of literature, art, political science, the understanding and interpretation of history, much of psychology, anthropology, sociology and, of course, philosophy. Is Weinberg seriously prepared to dismiss all these fields of study, most of which have been at the core of Western civilization since Homer and Plato, in the same cavalier manner in which he dismisses theology? Weinberg ignores Adam Czerniawski’s letter with its apparently flippant quip about Hitler, though actually it points to an important truth about Nazism – ie, that its ideological components included eugenics and Social Darwinism, which were direct (if illegitimate) descendants of evolutionary theory. Perhaps, using Dawkins’s logic, we should start talking about evolutionary theory as the root of evil.
ANDREW MICHALSKI
26b Walton Crescent, Oxford.
‘Will to Power’
Sir, – Georges S. Kaye’s reference to Nietzsche’s Will to Power (“Emma Hardy’s illness”, Letters January 26) badly needs correction. Nietzsche wrote no such work. His notorious sister Elisabeth, together with Peter Gast (both philological and philosophical nonentities), had felt the need to create Nietzsche’s Opus Magnum posthumously from jottings, aphorisms and the like, which were extracted from his papers (first published in 1901 and again, in a greatly enlarged edition, in 1911). Furthermore, they range over the years 1882–8 – thus hardly written “in the briefest of spans”, as Mr Kaye has it. All this has been well known since the early 1960s.
HELMUT SCHWARZER
17 Morse Lane, Newbury, NH 03255.
Edith Wharton
Sir, – I can understand why Edith Wharton chafed at “the question” of her debt to Henry James. In addition to the differences cited in Michael Gorra’s review of Hermione Lee’s biography of Wharton (February 9), it should be mentioned that she was funnier than James. Passages in her writing have the humour that enlivens the pages of Jane Austen: a keen eye for human foibles leavened by a wit that makes the reader chuckle, even laugh out loud – not a response that occurs so often when reading Henry James.
ROGER ERICKSON
8 Gaffney Street, Glen Cove, New York 11542.
Sir, – I have no argument with Michael Gorra’s take on Hermione Lee’s new biography of Edith Wharton, but I would like to suggest that in proposing that Wharton, together with Willa Cather, “produced the most enduring body of American fiction in the period between James and Faulkner”, he is bypassing the towering achievement of Theodore Dreiser, whose Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, The Titan, The Financier and An American Tragedy constitute one of the great achievements of our literature, however unfashionable they may be today.
ROBERT GOTTLIEB
237 East 48th Street, New York 10017.
Lassitude
Sir, – I was fascinated to read in Oswyn Murray’s review (February 9) about Professor Christian Fordyce of Glasgow. As an “assistant” (Glasgow for “assistant lecturer”) in 1962, I attended a party for new academic staff given by Fordyce, presumably as Clerk of Senate. I remember vividly one part of his welcoming speech. “Gentlemen [sic], whenever I go to
St Andrews, I feel impelled to write a book. When I get back to Glasgow, the climate, alas, overcomes me and lassitude reasserts itself”. Unthinkable in today’s research-driven academic culture, that remark perhaps explains the saga of his Catullus.
CLIFF DAVIES
Wadham College, Oxford.
Nashe and Shakespeare
Sir, – Penny McCarthy (Letters, February 16) objects to my Commentary piece (“Company Man”, February 2) on grounds of what she calls my “faulty chronology”. Shakespeare’s writing, I suggested, underwent a significant shift in 1594 when the playwright joined the Lord Chamberlain’s Men – Henry IV and The Merchant of Venice both showing signs of that change of circumstance. Dismissing my argument, McCarthy states that these plays had been completed by 1592 and 1594, respectively.
In claiming these dates, McCarthy might have done well to acknowledge herself in a small minority. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor’s exhaustive study William Shakespeare: A textual companion concludes on the basis of sources, metrical tests, topical allusions and other evidence that both plays must have been composed in the two years 1596–97. That verdict is endorsed in the most recent edition of Alfred Harbage’s Annals of English Drama. Dates of 1596 or later are also found in the current Oxford, Cambridge and Arden editions of these plays.
McCarthy bases her views on supposed allusions by Thomas Nashe. Her reasoning is rather quirky: the echoes, where acknowledged as such, are widely accepted as showing Shakespeare in Nashe’s debt. McCarthy even dates Hamlet as 1592 or earlier, again on the basis of “traces” in Nashe. The “traces” in question connect with Thomas Kyd’s lost Hamlet, not Shakespeare’s play. Here, as elsewhere, McCarthy disregards evidence assembled by generations of scholars. On this basis she makes Shakespeare’s early years very busy indeed.
BART VAN ES
St Catherine’s College, Oxford.
Trajan’s column
Sir, – In her informative review of Representations of War in Ancient Rome (February 2), Mary Beard is a little misleading when she asserts that any interpretation of Trajan’s Column must necessarily be treated with caution because the column’s images were, for the Ancients, “virtually invisible from the ground”. It’s true that you can’t see a thing today, but originally the column stood in the middle of a courtyard surrounded by galleries from which viewing was possible.
ZADIE SMITH
Piazza Sforza Cesarini, Rome.
John Betjeman
Sir, – Am I the only person who looks on Elizabeth Johnson’s review of William Peterson’s bibliography of John Betjeman (February 2) as petty and its over-concentration on minor points of title etiquette overdone? Maybe Mr Peterson overlooked some minor indexing points in his huge endeavour, but all the entries are perfectly serviceable and merit maybe a sentence of complaint, not a column. These complaints tell the reader more about the character of the reviewer than they do about the character of the bibliography. This sort of “criticism” should have been properly edited itself. Can we have a “Review of Reviewers”? Some cannot see the woods for the trees.
ROBERT HANROTT
27 Kensington Church Street, London W8.
Virgil in English
Sir, – Reviewing Robert Fagles’s translation of the Aeneid (February 7), Richard Jenkyns cites Dryden as the “one enormous exception” to the tendency of “leading poets” to abstain from Englishing Virgil. Sir David Lyndsay, having written in Scots, is presumably ineligible here; but no such argument applies to William Morris, whose 1877 Aeneid, while more Homeric than Virgilian in point of style, is the equal of Dryden’s for poetic splendour and narrative zest.
DANIEL GRADER
31A Market Street, St Andrews.
