An explanation of this part of the blog, and a list of all the sub-categories, can be found on the list of Pages on the top-right of your screen.
Pseudonyms 1 gave you:
1. Genuine Pseudonyms: noms de plume, de brosse, de camera, de highwire in one case, plus aliases, and even noms de guerre and de religion
2. Nicknames now assumed to be, or treated as, their actual name
3. Translations from foreign languages (mostly into English but I have included Latinisations and some others)
Pseudonyms 2 gave you:
4. I prefer to use other (or fewer) parts of my name(s)
5. Does it have to be spelled that way?
6. Stick to the initials
7. Word-games and other oddities
Pseudonyms 3 will now give you:
8. Self-aggrandisations (and one or two self-dis-aggrandisations as well, at the end)
9. Hermaphronyms
10. I am content to be known by my husband’s name
Listed here by the name they have on the Index, then note the changes!
Saying where you come from identifies you with the aristocracy, because they are always both names - Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, for example. So you will find:
Honoré Balssa, transformed into Honoré Balzac originally, but then Honoré de Balzac to sound even more posh: among the pseudonyms on Feb 8; born on May 20; statued by Rodin and critiqued by Barthes on Nov 12 [serious scribes] and I am assuming that he chose Balzac for his pseudonym because of Anne Malet de Graville (for whom see under Ancien Regime in Woman-Blindness and on Dec 14 )
Harley Granville(-)Barker: he added the hyphen when he became an actor: born Nov 25 [the world as stage]
Thomas Becket was converted long after his death into Thomas à Becket, probably based on Robin Hood characters such as George à Green and Alan à Dale, themselves deliberate mockeries. Why? And by whom? Protestants in the Elizabethan age who were upset at his murder, let alone his Catholic canonisation; mentioned on March 15 and June 24, murdered on December 29 [Aenglisch list]
Daniel Defoe eventually: plain Foe when he started, first change to de Foe, then reduced slightly to the mere Defoe; though I do wonder if he made the second change because the first had become a negative, even a cause of derision, given the crowd of dissenters that he moved among: Man Fridayed on Feb 1; buried among those dissenters on Nov 28 [serious scribes]
Marie-Olympe de Gouges is how she is remembered, but originally Marie Gouze; guillotined on Nov 3 1793 for daring to authoress the “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen” [listed in the Napoleonic Era page of "Woman-Blindness", and among the political ideologues]
Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Lucien Ducasse): "Comte" was self-bestowed; Latréaumont, spelled slightly differently, was the chief villain in the 1837 historical novel "Latréaumont" by Eugène Sue; a mere passing mention on Jan 5 [The Poets]
Lij Tafari Makonnen; Ras and Haile Selassie are his titles: “prince” and “meaning of the Trinity”: born July 23; deposed Sept 12 [Africa list]
Medici: several members of the family appear on the blog, as Dukes of Tuscany among the Merely Mentioneds, even once as a Pope among the purple cloaks. Medici means "medical", and was a trade-name taken in the middle ages, like Smith and Cooper and Baker; but doesn't it sound so much better as "de Medici"!
Anne-Josèphe Terwagne, also known as Théroigne de Méricourt from her birthplace, which was actually plain and dull Marcourt, in Belgium: leading the women into revolution on Aug 10; crowned for doing so on Oct 5; beaten up by her fellow revolutionaries on May 15 [responses to bullying]
Geoffrey of Monmouth, which simply denotes where his monastery was located; but he liked to render his over-inflated ego as Galfridus Monemutensis or sometimes Galfridus Arturus, the latter intended, presumably, to pretend that he was a biological descendant of what he had now turned into an authentic human; coming from Monmouth as he did, he also liked the Cymry version, though he would have called it Welsh: Galfridus Artur Gruffudd ap Arthur Sieffre o Fynwy; creating pseudo-history, including his own, on Jan 13 [reverend writers]
But however grand any of the above may have hoped to sound,
none of them was quite so pretentious as Paracelsus: really Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus
Bombastus von Hohenheim, which is
self-esteemificating enough: an “aureolous” is a type of halo; “theophrastus”
means “godlike speech" in Greek; "pretentious words” is the official
definition of “bombastic”, and that was just his parents naming him!; but around
1516 he began using the name “para-Celsus”, meaning “above” or “beyond” or simply
“better than” Celsus - that latter being Aulus Cornelius Celsus, a 1st-century Roman medical writer; superego can be found, reduced to sitting
on a tuffet, on March 15 [E,M&C2]
Thomas
Penson (de) Quincey: yep, like Balzac and Foe
and Arc, the “de” got added as a
pretension later, in this case by his mum: born Aug
15 [lighter writers]
John Soan(e), and it may
even have been Swan before he fancied it up as Soan; he added the
"e" when he got his knighthood: merely mentioned on March 15 [illustrious illustrators]
Eric Oswald (Hans Carl Maria
Von) Stroheim: the bits in
brackets were added when he moved to America: born Sept
22 [the world as stage]
Emanuel Swedberg: changed to Swedenborg
when he met God in 1741: born Jan 29
*
9. Hermaphronyms, a term invented by me, but not patented or
copyrighted, so feel free to add it, with or without a hyphen, to whatever term
you use to describe these things. Mostly these are the Spanish way of
doing it, names like Salvador Dali's -
Salvador
Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech - where they have mum and
dad's family names conjunctived - Dalí i Domènech - dad first, mum second, but
only use one; or the English equivalent, which double-barrels, using a hyphen
instead of the "&". But there are a few others as well, such as
Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt: Desroches was her family name; Noblecourt was hermaphronymmed when
she married so that she could keep her own but also acknowledge her husband; a
lot of families do that today for their children; Egyptologist on Feb 21 and Oct 21
Edgar Poe is another variety of this; Poe was his birth-family name, but Allan was added when he was adopted by a family with that
name: born Jan 19; “The
Raven” on April 18; first
marriage on May 16; mentioned
in Baltimore on Sept 12; found
dead in a gutter en route to his second wedding on Oct 7 [serious scribes]
Miguel
de Unamuno y Jugo: born Sept 29
[reverend writers]
the standard Spanish
form, allowing both parents to be named, dad first, then mum; though he only
used the patronymic
A third different sort,
Henry Campbell-Bannerman, though his birth certificate only gives his father's name, Campbell; it was
he who hermaphronymmed it later on by hypenating his mother's surname: Liberal
PM of England on Dec 5
Lady Jayne Seymour
Fonda, without a hyphen (mum was
Frances Ford Seymour, dad Henry Fonda), but actually one of the neatest of all
the hermaphronyms, especially as dad was a Shakespearian actor and mum a high
class socialite: Lady
Jayne hated it and dropped the Lady and the "y" in Jayne very quickly, then simply didn't use the Seymour:
playing Lillian
Hellman on June 20 [the world as
stage]
Maria (Marie) Salomea
Skłodowska-Curie: isolated
radium with husband Pierre Curie on April 20; both mentioned on March 1 and listed among the scientific achievements on Jan 1 [E,M&C2]
Ida Rauh Eastman: she was
born Ida Rauh but insisted on keeping her maiden name when she married Max Eastman; among
the last friends of DHL in Santa Fé on March 2 [illustrious illustrators]
Millicent
Garrett Fawcett, again birth name (Millicent
Garrett) with husband's name
appended (Henry Fawcett), but
not hyphenated: April 27 (though it really
belongs on the 23rd) [Woman-Blindness]
Meta
Vaux Warrick Fuller: once again her
birthname, Warwick,
plus husband Solomon Fuller,
unhyphenated [illustrious
illustrators]
Marie Louise Élisabeth
Louise Vigée-Lebrun: standard double-barrel: her portrait in words
on April 16; her portrait of Marie Antoinette on Oct 16;
also with Sophie de Grouchy on May 5 [illustrious illustrators]
Sometimes it's more
complex, because you started out double-barreled, like Elizabeth
Moulton-Barrett, so which one do you drop when you get married but
want to keep your birthname? You can't really be triple-barreled, can you? Elizabeth
Barrett-Browning is the answer on this occasion: Sept 12 [The Poets]
And finally, but you
will need to look up her husband at his own listing to really enjoy this;
an oddity because she was always Hillary Clinton,
pure wife, when he was
President, and still so when she was Secretary of State under Jo Biden; but her
maiden name resumed, Hillary Diane Rodham
Clinton, when she made a bid for the Presidency herself (and sadly
got trumped)
*
10. I am content to be known by my husband’s name
Self-evidently some of the women in the list below were not in the slightest bit content to use their husband's name, but were required to do so, by law, by religion, by social custom, quite possibly by all three at the same time, and would have followed the examples of Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt and Ida Rauh Eastman, above, had they been able to do so. Having said which, take someone like Virginia Woolf, as ardent a feminist as you will encounter, and in a time and place that did enable such a choice...
and therefore, logically, I am listing them alphabetically
by those married-names, with their birthname in brackets
Madame ("Fanny") D'Arblay (Frances Burney): in
correspondence with Maria Edgeworth on
May 22; born June 13; one of the
original Blue Stockings on July 23; chez Lady Montagu on Oct 2 and Oct 5 (husband Charles is also mentioned on that latter date)
[serious scribes and Woman-Blindness] - the early books were first anonymous, then Miss
Burney, then Fanny Burney;
but all her books after she got married had either Frances
d'Arblay or Madame d'Arblay
Marie
Geneviève Charlotte Thiroux d'Arconville (Marie-Geneviève-Charlotte Darlus): preserved on this blog on Dec 23; treated with copper, camphor and cinchona among the pursuers of
E,M&C2, and on the Ancien Régime page
of "Woman-Blindness"
Nancy
Astor (Nancy Witcher Langhorne): died May
2; won a by-election on Nov 28;
No 4 St James' Square on Dec 4
Anna Laetitia Barbauld: she published her first volume of poems under her birthname,
Aikin, but afterwards used her
married name: among the Blue-Stockings on July
23 and Oct 2 [The Poets and Woman-Blindness] [pseudonyms]
Amelia
Bloomer (Amelia Jenks): born May 26, referenced on July 12 and Nov 3 [Bloomers list]
Madame du
Boccage (Anne-Marie Fiquet Le Page): role-modelling Mme Verdurin on Oct 5; but among The
Poets herself, and on the Ancien Régime page
of "Woman-Blindness"
"Fanny" Boscawen (Frances
Evelyn Glanville): one of the original Blue Stockings on July 23 [Woman-Blindness]
Rabbi Dina Brawer
(Dina Elmaleh): became the UK's first "female Orthodox Rabbi" on June 3; click here for her
website
Suzanne Buisson (Suzanne Lévy):
une
Femme de la Résistance on Jan 26
Hélisenne
de Crenne (Marguerite de Briet): describing “The
Torments of Love” on Aug 25 and the Ancien
Régime page of Woman-Blindness
Elizabeth Fry (Elizabeth Gurney):
born May 21 [political
ideologues]
Indira
Gandhi (Indira Priyadarshini Nehru): became PM
on Jan 18;
assassinated on October 31; also mentioned on Feb
29
and Dec 27
Amy
Euphemia Garvey (Jacques) (born December 31 1895; died July
25 1973): journalist and activist, co-founded the Universal Negro
Improvement Association (UNIA) in Kingston, Jamaica in 1914 with her
husband Marcus Garvey [pre-Columban Americas]
Mrs
Gaskell (Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson): born Sept
29 [serious scribes and Woman-Blindness]
Françoise
de Graffigny (Françoise d'Issembourg du Buisson d'Happoncourt):
discovered by Voltaire
and supported by Émilie du Châtelet on
Feb 11,
until they fell out over Joan of Arc
[serious scribes and the
Ancien Régime
page of "Woman-Blindness"]
Ursula
Le Guin (Ursula Kroeber): born Oct 21 [lighter
writers]
Katharine Gün (Teresa Harwood):
all charges dropped on Feb 23 [responses to bullying]
Eliza Haywood (Elizabeth
Fowler): acting, writing, publishing "The Female Spectator", and
massively influencing Jane Austen on Feb 25 (world as
stage and serious scribes)
Therese
Huber: more complex than most, she called herself Marie Theresa Heyer before
her marriage - though in fact her birthname was Marie
Theresa Wilhelmine Heyne - but not Maria Theresa Forster, despite
having that as her married name; she and her first husband divorced and she did
then happily adopt her second husband's name: writing prolifically on June 14
Elizabeth Inchbald (Elizabeth
Simpson); dramatising "Lovers’ Vows", though not in Jane
Austen's production, on Oct 15
Anna Brownell Jameson (Anna
Brownell Murphy): born May 17; with Lily
Gaskell on Sept 29
Jacqueline ("Jackie")
Kennedy (Jacqueline Lee Bouvier): supporting Christiane Desroches Noblecourt on Oct 21
Augusta Ada King-Noel,
Countess of Lovelace (Augusta Ada Byron): the full tale of her
brilliance on June
5; her home in London is on Dec 4; her partner in computing, Charles Babbage, reappears on Dec 26; and
unable to avoid her dad on Jan
22 [E,M&C2]
Lady Caroline
Lamb (Caroline Ponsonby): married to William Lamb, Lord Melbourne; alluded to on Jan 22 [lighter writers]
Estée Lauder (Josephine
Esther Mentzer): born July 1
Nicole-Reine Lepaute (Nicole-Reine Étable de la Brière): her husband was the royal clockmaker Jean-André Lepaute: predicting the future mathematically on April 1; and mentioned, I
think that must be five days later, geting somewhat eclipsed herself by being
just one on a much longer list, on April 6; (Ancien Régime page of "Woman-Blindness", and a listing, because Time is a function of Space,
on the page for E,M&C2)
Doris
Lessing (Doris May Tayler): born Oct
22 [serious
scribes and a mention on the Africa page]
Mabel Dodge Luhan
is how she is most remembered, but Mabel
Ganson on her birth certificate, and last-named Evans, Dodge and Sterne
before she became Luhan: chez Gertrude Stein on Feb
3; turning me into a poacher and DHL into a
mystic on March 2 [illustrious illustrators]
Alma Mahler (Schindler):
Happily married, but three times, though oddly she only kept two of the married
names - her second husband was Walter Gropius, the third Franz Werfel - often
appearing as Alma Mahler-Werfel in later life; married Gustav Mahler and sung by Tom Lehrer on March
29; hosting a dinner party on Feb 11
Josephine Bernadette
McAliskey (Josephine Bernadette Devlin): born April 23 [Éireland]
Sue Mingus (Susan
Graham), wife of Charlie: heading for the Ganges
on
Jan 5 [musical maestros]
Joni Mitchell (Roberta Joan
Anderson): with Charlie Mingus
on Jan 5
and W.C Handy on Nov 16 and Sept 27; listed among the
greats on April 22
and June 20;
unable to attend Woodstock but sang it anyway on Aug 15; making Hejira on Sept 24; born Nov 7; pretending to be Van Gogh on Dec 23; counted as a modern Trobairitz
on Jan 13 [musical maestros and illustrious illustrators]
Naomi - Baroness - Mitchison on her books (Naomi Mary
Margaret Haldane): demonstrating why she wasn’t a terribly good
historical novelist on May 2 [historians]
Elizabeth Montagu (Elizabeth
Robinson): born Oct 2 [Blue Stockings]
Lady Ottoline
Violet Anne Morrell (Cavendish-Bentinck by
birth): taking photos on Nov
22
Emmeline Pankhurst (Emmeline
Goulden): born July 14;
with Millicent Fawcett on April 27 [Woman-Blindness]
Dorothy Parker (Dorothy Rothschild): "what better birthday present?" on Aug 22; "can a Jewish girl even be a wasp? I think I need to rewrite that" on Oct 26 [The Poets]
Rosa Parks (Rosa Louise
McCauley): born on Feb 4;
stays seated on Dec 1, and her story
plays a prominent role on Feb 6;
role-modelling on May 16 (John Lewis), June
7 (Gandhi), July 12 and Aug
23 [responses to bullying]
Marie-Jeanne "Manon" Roland de
la Platière, or simply Manon Roland, but Marie-Jeanne Phlipon on her death certificate: (born March 17 1754; guillotined Nov
8 1793) [Woman-Blindness]
Léonie
Rouzade (born Louise-Léonie Camusat): feminism by allegory on Oct 25 [W-B]
Anne Sexton (Anne Gray Harvey):
born Nov 9; at McLeans with Robert Lowell and Sylvia
Plath on Nov 17 [The Poets]
Mary
Shelley (Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin): died on Feb 1, but that page also tells the
Geneva-Frankenstein story with PB and
Byron and “Pollydolly” (John Polidori); “Kosher Frankenstein” on March 11; April
27 has mum, Mary Wollstonecraft
(Godwin); PB drowned on July 8;
Mary was born on August 30 1797, but
that is only an Amber listing in my drafts folder and has not yet gone live.
Mentioned on Jan 22 [serious scribes]
Mary Somerville (Mary
Fairfax): born December 26 1780; died November 29 1872: “started her education in the
family library. In 1804 she married her cousin, Samuel Greig, son of Sir Samuel
Greig, of the Russian Navy. They lived in London until his death in 1807. Mary's second husband, William Somerville, encouraged her studies
in science and mathematics...” Somerville
Hall website here;
entertaining Ada
Lovelace on June 5 [E,M&C2]
Margaret Louise Higgins on her birth certificate; changed to Sanger on her
first wedding certificate, changed to Slee on the second one, but generally remembered as Margaret Sanger Slee,
so a hermaphronym that acknowledges both husbands, but drops her birthname:
brought birth control to the USA, clearly unsuccessfully to judge by its birth
rate, on Sept 14 [political ideologues]
Susan Sontag (Susan Rosenblatt):
born Jan 28; mentioned re Germaine Greer on Jan
29; at odds with Norman
Mailer on March 15 [philosophae]
Madame Tallien, or sometimes Théresia Tallien,
on her books; her birthname was Juana
Maria Ignazia Théresia de Cabarrús; July 28 (responses to bullying and Nap
Age of W-B)
Mrs Thrale (she and Henry had twelve children), née Salusbury, but more colourfully known by her
second married name, as Hester Lynch Piozzi;
writing a bitchy-snobby letter on Oct 5
Madame Tussauds (pronounced “Two Swords” by stupid English people:
Two-So please); Anna-Maria
(“Marie”) Grosholtz her birthname: being stared at by wax dummies on March 30 [illustrious illustrators]
Simone Veil (Simone Annie Liline Jacob): died June 30 [political
ideologues]
Hélène Viannay when she married, but Hélène
Victoria Mordkovitch on her birth certificate: l'une des Femmes de
la Résistance on Jan 26
Madame de Villedieu: this
one is me slightly cheating, but it is what she did, so I am vindicated; Marie-Catherine Desjardins, her birthname, on her early books; then she got
engaged, complete with formal signed documents, to Antoine Boësset, the Sieur
de Villedieu; he died before they got married, but equally out of love and a
recognition of the advantage of using his name, Madame
de Villedieu is how she is named on all her later books: can't make up her mind if she is a poet, a
playwright or a novelist on Oct
20; but definitely a serious scribe
on the Ancien
Régime page of Woman-Blindness
Ilse
Weber (née Ilse Herlinger): authoress/composer of books and songs for children, and a fellow-prisoner
at Terezin on April
1 [lighter writers]
Ilse Herlinger, but remembered by her married-name as Ilse Weber:
authoress/composer of books and songs for children, and a fellow-prisoner at
Terezin on April
1 [lighter
writers]
Virginia Woolf (Adeline
Virginia Stephen): born Jan 25
(husband Leonard’s birthday is on Nov 25; Bloomsbury is on May 18); see also July
28 [serious scribes]
And four men who need
to be added
Edward Fitzgerald, who can be found translating the “Rubáiyát” of Omar Khayyám on March 6; most unusually, his dad used his wife’s name, and Edward kept it: on his
birth certificate he was a Purcell [The Poets]
William
Jefferson Blythe III was his
birthname, but dad died while mum was pregnant, and she later remarried; as a
teenager he adopted step-dad's surname and became Bill Clinton: gets a mention doing some
dodging on Oct 15
Next, one who changed his name from his mum’s to his
dad’s, to acknowledge who had seeded his illegitimacy: James Louis Macie,
or probably Jacques-Louis Macie on his French birth certificate, but remembered as James
Smithson of the Institute (had he stayed
with the name on his birth-certificate, there would have been a Macie’s in
America long before the Straus family
arrived!); the Institute established on Aug 10, mentioned on Feb 9 and March
3. The full story of why he changed his name here [illustrious illustrators]
and speaking of the Straus
family, Nathan Straus Jr (see June 12)
was really Charles Webster Straus
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