Text 1

Middlemarch, Cecilia De Noel, and twenty-three other works of the late 1800s and early 1900s were rereleased in 2020 as publicity for a prestigious prize for women writers of fiction. Recognizing that women long had to use male pseudonyms for their works to be granted serious consideration (by publishers and readers alike), the campaign restored the authors’ given female names in place of such pseudonyms and brought visibility to identities that should not have been hidden.

Text 2

The belief that women historically were barred from publishing under names perceived as female is persistent. That it is also an overgeneralization becomes obvious when considering writers such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who published Poems and many other works under her own name in the 1800s, and Sara Payson Willis, who elected to use the female pseudonym Fanny Fern for her novels and newspaper columns in the mid-1800s.