I’m skeptical of this. C19 authors were not *forced* to use masculine pseudonyms; literary writing has always been a practice of imaginative self-fashioning. However well intentioned, this project undermines the towering *literary* work of George Eliot, Vernon Lee, and others. https://twitter.com/fem_scribblers/status/1293488874036047872

I’m also a little cynical about the fact that this project emerges in the UK during a time of massive and escalating attack on the civil rights of trans people. The notion that using a masculine identity undermines feminist work is a key plank of contemporary anti-trans ideology.

I’ve written a lot about trans resonances in Eliot’s writing, and in the broader notion of the masculine pseudonym. Scholarly readers might enjoy my essay “Trans Realism, Psychoanalytic Practice, and the Rhetoric of Technique”:

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/709221

And here’s a primer I wrote on the issue for non-academic readers, focused on James Barry and George Eliot, called “Down With These So-Called Gender Categories!”: https://grace.substack.com/p/down-with-these-so-called-gender

And then here’s a thread I did to celebrate Eliot’s bicentennial, focusing on the historical reasons *why* the author of /Middlemarch/ is conventionally referred to by a pen name and a feminine pronoun: https://twitter.com/graceelavery/status/1197845839718293504?s=21

And then lastly, remember that the “birth names” of these writers are usually, in fact, their father’s names. George Eliot’s father was Robert Evans; Vernon Lee’s father was Henry Paget, etc. Whose name are you really restoring here?