Reclaim Her Name Campaign - Finally giving female writers the credit they deserve

[allegate]

Reclaim Her Name (https://www.baileys.com/en-gb/reclaim-her-name-campaign)


Throughout history, many female writers have used male pen names for their work to be published or taken seriously.

In collaboration with the Women’s Prize for Fiction, we have put their real names on the front of their work for the first time to honour their achievements and give them the credit they deserve.

The collection of books celebrate the Women’s Prize for Fiction’s 25th anniversary of championing female writers everywhere.

The full collection of 25 books are free to download as eBooks so as many people as possible can have access to these amazing works. Physical box sets will also be donated to selected libraries across the country.

This is pretty impressive. They are all available as either pdf or epub files and you would use calibre (https://calibre-ebook.com/) to convert the epub to an azw3 for your kindle.

[allegro]

Mary Ann Evans!!

[allegro]

Mary Ann Evans was a surprise to me as well.

REALLY?

I couldn’t even get the site to load, I just knew she was George Eliot. I’ve read Middlemarch and Silas Marner, studied a lot of Victorian Lit.

And Isak Dinesen (Out of Africa) was really Karen Blixen.

The one most people don’t know is Harper Lee; she dropped her first name, Nelle, so that her name was more gender-ambiguous.

[allegate]

Update since launch: We are very sorry to say that a mistake was made at the launch of the Reclaim Her Name Collection. The front cover of The Life of Martin R. Delany featured the wrong person from the book. This was caused by human error at our agency VMLY&R and we should also have spotted this in our reviews. We have since withdrawn and replaced the front cover and are conducting a full investigation to understand exactly how this happened. We will also be putting further measures in place to ensure it can never happen again.

What does this mean, I wonder. It does explain why you can't download that book at this time.

and of course it's working now that I posted it. yay!

no, the epub link is still broken.

[allegate]

Or, you know, not.


https://twitter.com/nkjemisin/status/1296512106200731650

[allegro]

So true! I didn’t know they weren’t representing this!!

https://twitter.com/lucythereader/status/1293822384852676608?s=21

[botley]

Yes, that is true, my understanding is that George Eliot in particular wanted to present as a male voice in their writing. Framing it as a suppression of their (presumed, mind you) "preferred" name and gender is not right at all.