25 Women Writers from the Past Reclaim Their Names Thanks to Bailey's/Women's Prize for Fiction

Photograph: Baileys/Women's prize for fiction

As part of the overall celebration of the 25^th year of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Bailey’s, the prize sponsor, is to re-publish the works of 25 female authors who for one reason or another originally published the books under male, or male-sounding, nons de plume. The difference this time around is that the real names of the authors will be attached to their work.

And the good news for readers around the world, is that Bailey’s is making all 25 of these new e-books available to the public for free downloading. So, if you’ve been longing for a copy of Middlemarch by Mary Ann Evans, your wish is about to come true.

According to this article from The Guardian,:

Some of the books, like Middlemarch, are well-known, including A Phantom Lover, a ghost story from Violet Paget, who wrote as Vernon Lee; and Indiana, a romance from Amantine Aurore Dupin, the 19th-century author better known as George Sand, who famously scandalised society by wearing male clothing and smoking cigars in public.

Others are being brought to the forefront after forgotten decades, such as Keynotes, a collection of feminist short stories from 1893 that includes open discussions of women’s sexuality. The stories were written by Mary Bright, who wrote as George Egerton, in 1893; she would say of them that “I realised that in literature, everything had been better done by man than woman could hope to emulate. There was one small plot left for her to tell; the terra incognita of herself, as she knew herself to be, not as man liked to imagine her.”

[...]

“This was about looking back to the women in whose footsteps we walk – the way that other women did get their work into print or couldn’t get their work into print. It’s just such a joyous idea,” said the novelist Kate Mosse, who founded the Women’s prize 25 years ago, following an all-male Booker prize shortlist.

I love this idea - and now I'll be keeping my eyes open for an announcement from Bailey's that the books have been published and made available for downloading. If any of you, especially those of you in the U.K., see anything before I do, please do add the information here as a "comment." Thanks.