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Comment by apocalypstyx | Hacker News Reader

Has there ever been a major conspiracy theory / claim that a book ostensibly attributed to a male author was in fact composed by a female one?

In the same vein, would anyone contest Shakespeare's claim to the plays that bear his name if it were not for the fact that he was born a bit too low in the British class system?

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Historically many female authors published under male pen names. The Bronte sisters for example.

Yes. And a significant strain of public opinion believed that women shouldn't even be allowed to read their books because they were just too incompatible with womanhood. And even after the facts of authorship came out, some people still denied it. I almost suspect they weren't really accepted until they became the, sort of, categorical female writer per generation that that the history of British literature tends to display, along Austen and Eliot, etc.

Not a book, and not a "conspiracy" theory, but there is an audacious theory that Bach's wife wrote the suites for unaccompanied cello.

Shakespeare authorship is a bit of a special case as there is a peculiar lack of evidence, as opposed to a mass of evidence that has to be explained away with a "conspiracy", or an expected lack of evidence, as in the case of Bach: most of his works were neither published during his life nor found in a manuscript with his handwriting.

George Eliot?

James Tiptree Jr.

The thing about it is, also in reply to of George Eliot below by steerpike, is that, I'm not talking about, I don't think, authors who were suspected of being female. But, as with the case of Shakespeare and Shelley, the taking of authorship from one extant given individual to another who happens to be more conveniently attributed (i.e., those who are attributed with writing Shakespeare's plays are always upper-class British.)

It is interesting to note about Tiptree is that, after the revelation, is to look at the timeline of reviewer and commentator documentation from the time and how there was this whole chunk of the community that overnight did a 180 from thinking a male Tiptree was a decent to good writer to 'we / I always knew she wasn't that much'. Similar statements can be made for C.L. Moore, and others. (However, I don't mean to claim that the entirety, or even a substantial part of the SF community feels such, but I do find it interesting that the percentage of the community which does hold such seems to align, roughly, with the percentage of the relevant populations involved with the question of the authenticity of authorship of people such as Shakespeare and Shelley.)

edit:

The thing I think I'm trying to get at is that there seems to have been a shift, that is, Shakespeare and Shelley are so fundamental to a certain class of western identity, that it almost seems as the transfer of their authorship is to 'polish them up', because, while a few---if you were to just interview people off the street at random---know Austen and the Brontes, fewer Eliot, but who in the English-speaking world doesn't know some version of Frankenstein or that Shakespeare is supposed to be some big deal? (And even with Twilight, and what people seem to know of Heathcliff and Cathy, it's modernly, as with Jane Eyre, cast in the modern romantic (eros) mode, thereby deracinating them of their inherent social commentary.)

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