CHAPTER THREE

a (By a Lady': The Mask of the Feminine in

Restoration, Early Eighteenth-Century
Print Culture"
Margaret J M. Ezell

It is a commonplace among literary critics that early modern women

writers as a group shared a need for anonymity and developed authorial
strategies to protect their reputations as socially acceptable females.
Virginia Woolf's observation in A Room if One's Own that "Anon, who
wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman," is fre-
quently taken as being not only a description of an authorial practice,
but also as a critique of the patriarchal culture which demanded that
women artists-if they indeed could exist-hide their gender as a price
for their artistic expression. We expect early modern women writers to
give up their individual names, not because they wished to do so, but
because of the cultural constraints placed upon them.
In such interpretations, anonymity is imposed, not selected. The rela-
tionship between early modern women writers and the practice of
anonymous or pseudonymous authorship is seen as a direct response to
gender conflicts within a culture, an authorial device which acts as a dis-
guise for the protection of the writer, a masking device which indeed
creates the physical space on the title page for her to be a poet or an
essayist within the pages of a published text.
As satisfYing as such interpretations have been, there remain some
other questions which arise when one looks at the particulars of the texts
where women gained anonymity through employing either a pseudonym