TWENTY years ago, the mysterious Italian author of the acclaimed Neapolitan quartet chose Elena Ferrante for a pen name, an homage to her literary hero Elsa Morante. Perhaps Ms Ferrante, the world’s most famous anonymous writer, is also aware that her pseudonym is an aural echo of another name stamped with genius and a craving for anonymity: Brontë.
Closeted in a remote Yorkshire parsonage on the moor Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë battled tuberculosis, family deaths, financial pressures, an aloof father and an alcoholic brother to write novels of incandescent power. That these women chose to write under false names—Currer Bell, Ellis Bell, and Acton Bell to match their initials—was scarcely singular.
At the time, it would have been considered unseemly for a parson’s spinster daughters to write novels about vengeful love (“Wuthering Heights”), adultery and insanity (“Jane Eyre”), and alcoholism and broken marriages (“The Tenant of Wildfell Hall”). And when the reviews arrived, the sisters would have been grateful for their mask. Emily and Anne’s novels were savaged as “vulgar”, “brutalising”, and “pernicious”. “Jane Eyre” was richly praised by publications including The Economist, which said of Currer Bell’s book that
of all the novels we have read for years this is the most striking, and we may add, the most interesting. Its style as well as its characters are unhackneyed, perfectly fresh and lifelike, and the whole is as far removed from the namby pamby stuff of which fashionable novels are made, as from the cold, unnatural, and often disgusting productions of the French press.
We did, however, note a certain “coarseness” to the book—a “venial” flaw, commonly mentioned by other reviewers, who thought it nonetheless “honourable”. They would almost certainly have read it differently knowing that it was written by a Charlotte and not a Currer.
The Brontës’ mask was much more than a ruse to duck ridicule or vainglory. Their anonymity was liberating: it allowed their imaginations to trespass in the darkest crevices of the psyche and return with tormented monsters like Heathcliff, the Ahab of the moors, and dynamos like Miss Eyre. Their pseudonyms strengthened their moral resolve, emboldening them to speak truth to that most tyrannical seat of power: ordinary society.
Ms Ferrante’s incognito has lasted twenty years—a miracle in this day of hi-tech hacking. The Brontës’ secret, initially so airtight that even their father and brother were in the dark, lasted barely two. Their identity was revealed not in one swift stripping of the veil, but in incremental stages. The process started when Emily and Anne’s unscrupulous publisher began to put it about that Acton and Currer Bell were one person, hoping that Acton’s second novel, “Wildfell Hall”, would benefit from the best-selling “Jane Eyre”. When Currer Bell’s publisher, George Smith, wrote asking for an explanation, Currer and Acton were left with no choice but to travel to London to set the record straight.