When the final bit of ink has run dry, and you can’t think of another scene, plot, or line for your writing except for “The End”, an unimaginable sense of peace envelops you. As you turn the last page and clean up the scraps and spills of metaphors, the work is still searching for an author– a name to claim its conception and place it upon a shelf anywhere and everywhere around the world. The dotted line is waiting– how will you sign? With the name on your birth certificate, your childhood nickname in middle school? Your mother’s maiden name, or your married name? Perhaps all of these, and perhaps none.
When it comes to ownership, penmanship, and overall authorship of written works, things can get a bit intricate. As a creative writing student, I’m no stranger to the intimidation of placing one’s name upon a story, piece of prose, or article. It not only forms our careers, but also holds a bit of our souls within it. There is accountability, individual expression, and artistry tied in. To tackle the subject of pen names, I took a look at some historical cases, chatted with some of my friends, and dove back into some of my old writing from high school– oh dear!
One of my favorite English authors of the 19th century, Jane Austen herself, used a nom de plume for all of her works until her death in 1817 when her brother began publishing under her true name. Before then, the esteemed works we know and love today such as Emma, Sense & Sensibility, and of course Pride & Prejudice, were all published with the front cover reading ‘By a Lady’. This is an interesting case– in most historical contexts, a lady’s pen name would be used to mask her femininity, giving her work more credit and success in a world where a female author was not a widely accepted concept. Yet here, Austen makes an effort to let it be known that these novels were indeed written by a woman. I find this choice very compelling. Since Austen’s novels mostly focus on things deemed trivial by society of her time (and, sometimes, our time), tying the story to a woman’s pen almost feels like a moment of companionship or solidarity with her female readers, though indirect. As women of her time and ours would pick up the novels and read through these plots of domestic relations, struggles with love, and female perspectives on belonging and growth, there is credibility there in ‘A Lady’. I think Austen’s choice was a brilliant one– if she could not sign her own name, taking credit as a well-educated spinster of the time, she would find another way to credit her work to herself and ultimately, womanhood as a whole. We have her brother and nephew to thank for her true identity being acquitted to these novel works of word– for the work they have done for her career, even after her death.
While Austen’s testimony plays into the idea of gender expression, she does not hide her gender behind a name of little or opposite gender portrayal. A.M. Barnard, author of such wonderful tales of gothic thrillers and rough-and-tumble works in the early 1860s, would be much better known as Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women and its beloved sequel, Good Wives. By taking a look at her situation, we can understand Alcott’s motivation to publish under a pen name, and how it differs from Austen’s experience. As hinted at in Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation of Little Women in the scene, wherein the semi-autobiographical Jo March discusses her stories with Professor Bhaer, Alcott’s writing, at first, served as none but a job with which she could collect small sums of money to help her beloved family. In this position, all she wished for was the money to help her family, and not the esteem that came with writing (and, furthermore, the upset it would cause if it was known she wrote of killings and blood rather than flower fields and weddings). As the Louisa May Alcott House website recounts of her fifteen-year-old plea,
“I will do something by and by. Don’t care what, teach, sew, act, write, anything to help the family” and “. . . I will make a battering-ram of my head and make my way through this rough and tumble world”.
wise words from the writer who, at the age of thirty-five, wrote Little Women in that very house in the absence of her dear sister Elizabeth Alcott. In my own experiences of visiting the house, I can see how it would prove a wonderful stage for the sort of story Alcott was asked to write by her publisher– a girl’s story. A true homage to the way sisterhood revolves around what we love and have lost. Crediting Little Women, Good Wives, and the following stories such as Jo’s Boys to her own name adds a layer of truth and sentiment to the work Alcott did in her timeless novel. We can now celebrate her for both the fiction, and dedication to her family.
As literature grows, and so does the world around us, gender expression through authorship becomes less structured and more fluid, with new reasons to reject one name and embrace another. Today, it is most common for an author to use a pen name to reflect genre codes and success of their book in the market. When asked about their pen name experience, a friend of mine with hopes of publishing high fantasy novels expressed that the name ‘Sparrow’, which they had liked to use, would be a bit too on-the-nose for the genre. Then, they looked into familial names for inspiration. “I went through a lot of different family names after that, and landed on O’Neill by process of elimination” he stated regarding his pen name. “I came to Kit from the American Girl doll Kit Kittredge. I feel like there’s a lot of transmascs that had her growing up, and American Girl was my first special interest. As a kid I had no idea it was a typically masc name until I got into Heartstopper and Shadow & Bone, because they have Kit Connor and Kit Young. Finding a first name that feels like me has always been like pulling teeth, but this one isn’t awful”. So, they have settled, for now, upon Kit O’Neill, so look out for that name in future fantasy publications!
In my own experiences, the most grand memory I have of a pen-name-struggle was sitting at my home, working on a publication project I had taken into my own hands, and debating back and forth on what to name the creative voice I had at the time. I was quite young, and struggling during the pandemic to rekindle a sense of accomplishment and wholeness within any of my creative work. I was searching for a foothold, of sorts.
One of the greatest aspects of my public school career was the literary magazine I had been a part of, titled Penned and run by myself and a few dear friends along with our academic advisor. When lockdown disrupted my academic experience, working once again on that same publication was helpful in remembering how it is to create something tangible. I had published once before in the issue before we lost our printing service in the chaos of the pandemic, but I was (at the time) proud of the pieces I had put into the second issue. I formatted and ordered a few printed copies, to distribute to close audiences of family and friends, but before I could do that, I had to settle on a name.
In the first issue, I had gone by my full name, but it felt clunky and unrefined, as the magazine itself and my own writing was taking a turn toward the whimsical and benign. I pondered for a moment simply crediting myself as my first name and last initial, in a simplistic and minimalistic tone, but even that felt incorrect. I, too, searched for other familial names that may feel more well-suited to my work, but nothing fit into place as I needed it to– standing for the blissful and lavish prose of love stories as well as the raw and ruthless verse of heartbreak poetry. Finally, through whatever ends, I settled upon Haylie Belle– the soft nickname stemming from my father’s doing, much like my first name was his conjure. I placed that name upon these few, silly, purple magazines and set them upon my shelf, and the name followed with me as I outgrew the poetry of teenhood and moved into the narrative of more sophisticated historical fiction of many sorts. As I studied writing and added a few lines to my novels each day, the voice I curated felt true to the name, and I hope continues to do so.
Thus, I implore any readers to keep their eyes open for my works in the future– any tales of childhood feats or antiquated amorosity signed Haylie Belle. To you I leave this, a snippet of the poem “Eternal Dreamer” from Penned volume three, published in 2019 by one Haylie Jarnutowski as a freshman in high school:
I realize now as I sit to write
All that I have gained
And that never for who I am
Shall I ever be shamed.
