DH Project: Female Authors and Pen Names

Franco Moretti's project analyzing the length and grammatical composition of 7,000 British novel titles inspired me to consider the influence not only of how the title of a novel appears but also the author of a novel. To my knowledge, many women wrote (and indeed still write) novels using a pen name, only their initials, or as the ghost writer for a male novelist--the assumption being, people wouldn't read the novel if they knew it were penned by a woman. A digital humanities project that examined the frequency with which women used pen names--and how women used pen names--over the course of the novel's history would be fascinating.

Some questions I think such a project would answer, or attempt to answer:

• During which time periods did women write under pen names the most? The least?
• Is there a correlation between a time period's political and/or sociohistorical events and the frequency with which women wrote using pen names? (ex: Did women's suffrage inspire women to use their real names as an act of defiance in the 1920s?)

Some challenges I think the project would pose:

• How would you determine the true purpose of a pen name? (ex: J.K. Rowling--a pseudonym in itself--has written under the pen name Robert Galbraith, presumably due to the fame of her own name, and her desire for readers to view her other works distinctly from Harry Potter...although to be fair, she did choose a man's name and not a woman's.) Moreover, some pen names are created simply because they sound better than the author's original name, more catchy and memorable. 

• Considering the often disorganized and haphazard way that author names are cataloged (either by real name or pen name) in library databases, how would you go about gathering the information accurately? 

Nevertheless, I think Moretti's call to action can apply specifically to this possible project: "take those units of language that are so frequent that we hardly notice them, and show how powerfully they contribute to the construction of meaning" (156).