Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Authors Who Wrote Under Pseudonyms
Some of the books you already know by heart were never published under the name of the woman (or man) who wrote them. A pen name could mean the difference between being reviewed as a serious novelist and being dismissed before the first page — or, for someone like Elena Ferrante, the difference between the work being read and the author’s biography being read instead. This page is a working list of authors who chose, for very different reasons, not to publish as themselves.
By Lisanne Swart · 9 authors · Updated July 2026
The short answer
It was rarely about hiding for its own sake
Most of the authors below picked a pseudonym to be read differently: as a man, as someone new, as a stranger, or simply as a writer rather than a public figure.
For women, it was often survival, not preference
The Brontës and George Eliot didn’t experiment with anonymity for fun — Victorian publishing genuinely judged women’s fiction differently, and they knew it.
Emily BrontëWrote as: Ellis Bell
Emily, Charlotte, and Anne Brontë self-published a joint poetry collection in 1846 as Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, and kept the names for their first novels the following year — Emily’s Wuthering Heights appeared as Ellis Bell’s. Charlotte later explained the sisters chose names that were deliberately androgynous rather than false, since they suspected, correctly, that reviewers judged a novel differently once they knew a woman had written it. Emily’s authorship wasn’t confirmed publicly until after her death in 1848. See her full author guide for her complete body of work.
George EliotReal name: Mary Ann Evans
Mary Ann Evans took the pen name George Eliot for her first novel, Adam Bede, in 1859, and kept it for Middlemarch and the rest of her fiction. She wanted her work judged as serious literature rather than filed under the lighter romantic novels Victorian women were expected to produce, and a male name also gave her cover from the scandal surrounding her decades-long relationship with the married critic George Henry Lewes, whom she couldn’t legally marry.
Mark TwainReal name: Samuel Clemens
Samuel Langhorne Clemens began signing his journalism as Mark Twain in 1863, borrowing the phrase riverboat pilots called out to mean two fathoms of safe water beneath the hull — a term from his own years piloting steamboats on the Mississippi. By the time The Adventures of Tom Sawyer appeared in 1876, Twain wasn’t really a disguise anymore; it had become his public identity, distinct from the private, more guarded man underneath it.
Lewis CarrollReal name: Charles Dodgson
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a mathematics lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford, published Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865 as Lewis Carroll, a Latinized play on his own first and middle names. He wanted a clean line between his academic reputation and his children’s fiction, and reportedly grew uncomfortable whenever the two identities were connected publicly during his lifetime.
Elena FerranteIdentity: undisclosed
Elena Ferrante has published under that name since 1992, most famously for the Neapolitan Novels beginning with My Brilliant Friend in 2011, and has never confirmed her identity. In 2016 an Italian journalist published financial records he said pointed to a specific translator, a claim Ferrante’s publisher has never verified. Ferrante has said in interviews that anonymity lets a book stand on its own, without the author’s biography pulling focus from the work itself.
Robert GalbraithReal name: J.K. Rowling
J.K. Rowling published the crime novel The Cuckoo’s Calling under the name Robert Galbraith in 2013, wanting reviews and sales built entirely on the writing rather than her Harry Potter reputation. It sold modestly and was well reviewed as a debut — until a lawyer leaked the connection to a journalist a few months later, and sales jumped once her name was attached.
Richard BachmanReal name: Stephen King
Stephen King published five novels as Richard Bachman between 1977 and 1984, partly to test whether his success came from talent or from name recognition, and partly because publishers at the time limited how many books an author could release in a year. A Washington D.C. bookstore clerk named Steve Brown noticed stylistic overlaps and public records connecting the two names, and King confirmed it himself in 1985 rather than let it leak.
Ayn RandReal name: Alisa Rosenbaum
Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum emigrated from Soviet Russia to the United States in 1926 and adopted the name Ayn Rand before publishing her first novel; The Fountainhead, in 1943, was the book that made the name widely known. Accounts differ on exactly how she chose it, but she used it for the rest of her writing life, separating her public authorial identity from her family history in Russia.
Maya AngelouReal name: Marguerite Johnson
Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson; her brother Bailey nicknamed her “Maya” as a child, a shortening of “my sister” he couldn’t otherwise pronounce. In the early 1950s, while performing as a calypso dancer and singer at San Francisco’s Purple Onion nightclub, her managers pushed her to adopt something more distinctive than “Marguerite Johnson,” so she paired her childhood nickname with a variation of Angelos, her first husband Tosh Angelos’s surname, and had it legally changed. Unlike the other names on this list, Angelou’s wasn’t built to hide her identity or her gender — it started as a stage name for her dance career and simply carried over when she published I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in 1969, becoming the name the world came to know her by. See her full author guide for her complete body of work.
Frequently asked questions about authors and pen names
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Authors Like Maya Angelou
For more voices that turned lived hardship into precise, dignified prose.
Reading List
Books by Female Authors
The wider shelf these pseudonym stories come from.
Author Index
Every Author Guide, A–Z
The full alphabetical directory, if you want to keep browsing.
