Nom de Plume

Book excerpt: A literary history of eighteen authors from the 19th and 20th centuries and their famous pseudonyms. Exploring the fascinating stories of more than a dozen authorial impostors across several centuries and cultures, Carmela Ciuraru plumbs the creative process and the darker, often crippling aspects of fame. Only through the protective guise of Lewis Carroll could a shy, half-deaf Victorian mathematician at Oxford feel free to let his imagination run wild. The three weird sisters from Yorkshire—the Brontës—produced instant bestsellers that transformed them into literary icons, yet they wrote under the cloak of male authorship. Bored by her aristocratic milieu, a cigar-smoking, cross-dressing baroness rejected the rules of propriety by having sexual liaisons with men and women alike, publishing novels and plays under the name George Sand. Highly accessible and engaging, these provocative stories reveal the complex motives of writers who harbored secret identities—sometimes playfully, sometimes with terrible anguish and tragic consequences. Part detective story, part exposé, part literary history, Nom de Plume is an absorbing psychological meditation on identity and creativity. Praise for Nom de Plume A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year “Each page affords sparkling facts and valuable insights into . . . the eternally mysterious, often tormented interface between life and literature.” —Elif Batuman “A richly documented literary excursion into the inner, secret lives of some of our favorite writers.” —Joyce Carol Oates “You are on the second to last page . . . and wishing you weren’t because this book is such great fun.” —San Francisco Chronicle “[An] engrossing, well-paced literary history. . . . It’s biography on the quick, and done well.” —Bookforum