A masked ball

“Few writers are able to create a different world for you to live in”, the TLS said of a new novel, in 1963, “yet Miss [Victoria] Lucas in The Bell Jar has done just this.” This was quite a debut, clearly, although it had to be acknowledged that the unknown Miss Lucas was very much “exploring” as she wrote – “if she can learn to shape [a story] as well as she imagines, she may write an extremely good book” – but The Bell Jar was “already a considerable achievement”, nonetheless.

As Kirsty McHugh and Ian Scott point out in Pen Names (Bodleian Library, £14.99), “Victoria Lucas” was originally the name of The Bell Jar’s heroine; or maybe it was originally the name on the fake ID that the book’s real author, Sylvia Plath, used to get into bars “when she was an underage student”. In any case, the name was changed (to Esther Greenwood) only as Plath’s publisher nervously attempted to forestall accusations that The Bell Jar was an identifiably autobiographical work – “this could result in libel actions”, as the (pseudonymous?) co-authors of Pen Names explain. Plath’s own name did not appear on the title page of this “considerable achievement” until it was republished in 1966.

Some of the pen names in Pen Names are equally well known, although the real people and the stories behind them may not be. Prevented from publishing his work under his own name by the rules of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, for example, James Alfred Wight took “James Herriot” from a Birmingham City goalkeeper. Ibsen’s Rosmersholm gave Cecily Isabel Fairfield the name “Rebecca West”. She thought her birth name best suited to someone “blonde and pretty”, but didn’t much like her “harsh” pseudonym, either (or Ibsen’s play).

And if you are ever asked which of her novels Agatha Christie found most satisfactory, you may turn to Pen Names for the answer: it was a novel by “Mary Westmacott”.

Christie got away from crime by writing a series of autobiographical stories under this name (a compound of one of her middle names and the surname of some distant relatives), and once said that Absent in the Spring (1944), a Westmacott work, was “the one book that has satisfied me completely … the book that I had always wanted to write”. Five years later, the Sunday Times unsportingly ruined Christie’s fun by revealing who Westmacott really was.

As McHugh and Scott note, Pen Names “grew out of” research on an exhibition of the same name, which opened at the National Library of Scotland in 2022. It sticks to noms de plume of the past two centuries: “The nineteenth century … is the period when literature starts to resemble a masked ball”. We suspect that there was also something masked-ball-like about the age of romances attributed to “a lady” or histories by “a clergyman”. Could the stories behind them be as interesting, though? Is there material enough for “Pen Names: A prequel”?

Charity shops sometimes seem to consider books “collectible” when they are merely old. But exceptions to the trend are, as recently demonstrated, quite possible. Two hardback volumes in rubbed and worn binding had been donated to Oxfam’s bookshop in Chelmsford, Essex; they turned out to be the first complete translation of the Bible into Chinese (1815–22), made in Serampore in Bengal by John Lassar and Joshua Marshman.

Auctioned by Bonhams last month, this Chinese Bible was expected to fetch no more than £800; it sold for £56,280 (including premium). Books can sell for much more at auction, of course, but this is some going by Oxfam standards. The charity had twenty-three other items in that Bonhams auction, including a seventeenth-century manuscript prayer book and a first edition of A Christmas Carol; combined, they made less than lot 46, that Chinese Bible.

The British Heart Foundation also has branches that specialize in books, so we asked if such donations ever come its way. They do. Pictured above, for one, is the well-preserved copy of A Gent from Bear Creek (1937, first edition) – Robert E. Howard’s tales of the ultra-tough Breckinridge “Breck” Elkins (“mighty of stature and small of brain”) – which made £3,399 for the charity in 2017. An autograph book signed by the Beatles went for £3,600 around the same time. Impressive largesse or bibliographical ignorance on the part of their respective donors is indicated by other recent charitable donations, including first editions of The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) and Winnie-the-Pooh (1926). Keep them coming, we say – while hoping that there’ll always be plenty of old books knocking around for much smaller sums.

Thanks to the Londoner – a “new quality newspaper for London, delivered via email” – we now know that literature is cool again. Not any old literature. Not Rob Roy or My Ántonia. We mean “London’s hot new literary scenes”, exemplified by “buzzy new reading nights” such as Soho Reading Series, Rivet Reads and New Work.

Such nights aren’t just about the reading. According to a recent piece in the Londoner, they are “as raucous as any queer techno night, as glamorous as any fashion party”. The people who attend them are “young, stylish and attractive. They have sex”. Gone are the “fusty, moribund affairs” of old, when “dowdy men and women in tweed jackets and moth-eaten knitwear would gather in bookshops, drink lukewarm wine from plastic glasses and return home by 10 p.m”.

There’s more to the Londoner than such stuff. But at least, on this occasion, it directed us to an online forum where an alternative view was offered. Rentokill_boy (this might be a pen name) attended one of the approved events in Holland Park, and certainly overheard some “modish young people” chatting away (“I just flew in from Milan! How was Jeremy’s launch last week?”). The readings included some poetry that “felt only marginally poetic” and a Google review of the animated film Ratatouille. The compère exhorted the audience to “find a beautiful person to kiss and have sex with”; “nervous laughter” ensued. How cool is that?

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