I am not sharing this well researched finding just because my daughter’s novel “Enchanted Incognito” has just been published or because I too am a bit of a writer. Unfortunately since the early 19th century though, often, women have used male pseudonyms, just when they were beginning to get into literature and they felt that they would not be taken as seriously by readers as male authors. For example:
Louisa May Alcott: Prominent 19th century writer Louisa May Alcott began her career under the male pen name A. M. Barnard. You remember Little Women ( I did it for Literature in 1984)
Joanne Rowling: As author of the outrageously popular series Harry Potter, J. K. Rowling gained widespread popularity in a span of only a few years.
Nelle Harper Lee: Writing under the abbreviated name Harper Lee, Lee’s pen name does not necessarily disguise her identity, but does make her authorship fairly androgynous. Harper Lee became wildly famous for her novel To Kill a Mockingbird. I did this one for Literature too and only discovered today that he was a she! 🙂
But if thou had a looketh at the survey conducted by Grammarly … you will see that if George Eliot were alive today, she would be better off sticking with her real name. After a ton of questions, over 3,000 respondents indicated that they believe women are better writers.
Men generally “got to the point,” while we women were more likely to focus on “character development.”
Women were more likely to write about people, while men write more about things. We also are more adept at crafting longer sentences. 🙂
In conclusion, Grammarly stated that, “Women tend to be more descriptive in their writing, and spend more time developing a greater variety of characters than men. Perhaps as a result, women are generally regarded to be better writers than men.”
See the detailed infographic.
