Free The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination by Ursula K. Le Guin

Bonheur, you don’t call yourself Georges Tristesse; you justpaint horses and sign “Rosa” large and clear. But writers, especially fiction writers, are always making up names. Do they confuse themselves with their characters?
    The question isn’t totally frivolous. I think most novelists are aware at times of containing multitudes, of having an uncomfortably acute sympathy for Multiple Personality Disorder, of not entirely subscribing to the commonsense notion of what constitutes a self.
    And there is a distinction, normally, between “the writer” and “the person.” The cult of personality erases this difference; with writers like Lord Byron and Hemingway, as with actors or politicians, the person disappears in the glare of the persona. Publicity, book tours, and so on all keep the glare focused. People line up to “meet the writer,” not realising that this is impossible. Nobody can be a writer during a book signing, not even Harlan Ellison. All they can write is “To Jane Doe with best regards from George Author”—not a very interesting story. All their admirers can meet is the person—who has a lot in common with, but is not, the writer. Maybe nicer, maybe duller, maybe older, maybe meaner; but the main difference is, the person lives in this world, but writers live in their imagination, and/or in the public imagination, which creates a public figure that lives only in the public imagination.
    So the pen name, hiding the person behind the writer, may be essentially a protective and enabling device, as it was for the Brontë sisters and for Mary Ann Evans. The androgynous Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell hid Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë from a publicity that might offend their small community, and also gave their manuscripts a chance to be read with an unprejudiced eye by editors, who would assume them to be men. George Eliot protected Mary Ann Evans, who was unrepentantly living in sin, from the dragon of social disapproval.
    I think one can assume that these personae also allowed the writers a freedom from inner censors, internalised shames and inhibitions, notions of what a woman “should” write. The masculine pen name, oddly enough, frees the woman author from obedience to a masculineconception of literature and experience. I think James Tiptree Jr. undoubtedly gave Alice Sheldon such freedom.
    But with Sheldon we come to another aspect of the pen name: the already public figure who wants or needs a different persona for a different kind of work.
    I don’t know if there was any actual professional need for Sheldon to be Tiptree; would she have lost a job or come under governmental suspicion if she’d published her stories under her own name? My guess is that her need for the pen name was primarily and intensely personal. She needed to write as somebody other than who she “was.” She had led a highly successful career as a woman, but as a writer she needed, at least at first, to present herself, perhaps even to herself, as a man. She found her alter ego on the label of a jar of marmalade. She slipped into the impersonation very comfortably, writing not only stories but letters as James Tiptree Jr., who became a beloved, treasured penfriend to many people. When she began to want to publish as a woman she used only half of her own name, calling herself Raccoona Sheldon (a name that troubles me, because the invented half is so grotesque that it seems a self put-down). Finally, when they blew her cover, she essentially stopped writing. It looks as if the name/mask, whether masculine or feminine, was above all an enabler to her, an escape route from a public self that could not or would not write, into a private self that was all writer.
    So how about Professor and Colonel Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger—what was Cordwainer Smith to him? From here on I rely completely and gratefully on the researches of John J. Pierce, the prime authority on Linebarger/Smith’s life and writing. In his fine