Meaghan Brown

The Shape of Anonymity: Projections of Authorship in Mary Astell’s Rhetoric

It is, perhaps, ironic to frame this paper with the name Mary Astell, given her stated preferences on the matter:

If any is so needlessly curious as to enquire from what Hand they come, they may please to know, that it is not good Manners to ask, since the Title-Page does not tell them: We are all of us sufficiently Vain, and without doubt the Celebrated Name of Author, which most are so fond of, had not been avoided but for very good Reasons.

([Mary Astell], Reflections upon Marriage ([3rd ed.] London: R[ichard] Wilkin, 1706) [π2r])

In early eighteenth-century England, anonymous publication did not indicate the absence of an author, but rather the presence of a carefully formed authorial self-projection. In the rush to ‘recover’ the writings of women between 1660 and 1800, modern scholarship has gone to great lengths to put names to ‘proto-feminist’ authors such as Astell.1 This scholarship has overlooked the importance of anonymity as an authorial presence. Indeed, by projecting a modern form of named authorship onto these women, feminist scholars are in turn negating and obfuscating their participation in a recognizable genre. Anonymity was an expected and important characteristic of polemical literature in this period.

In this paper I will discuss how Mary Astell and other women whose work has been entered into her oeuvre employed anonymity, pseudonymity, and authorial personas to shape the form of authorship they wished to project to their audience. The many works now associated with the name Mary Astell are bracketed by complex projections of an authorship defined by class, gender, and intellectual status. Rather than removing themselves from the authorial space as some sort of early feminist protest, these women employ an established but vital rhetoric of anonymity as a position of strength from which to manipulate the reception of their work.

Meaghan Brown is a first year P.h.D student in English Literature at Florida State University, currently studying with the History of Text Technologies program (HoTT). She did her undergraduate work at Oberlin College, where she graduated with Honors in History for a thesis on the translation history of Ovid in early modern England. She received her masters in Information Studies in 2008 from the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently working on several projects involving the rhetoric of paratexts in early modern printed books.