The greatest book ever written by a woman, according to Carrie Fisher
Carrie Fisher’s favourite book by a woman was written by a man. Or, at least, that is what many would still think if they didn’t know enough about Victorian era literature.
Of course, that notion is not uncommon. Wuthering Heights wasn’t initially written by Emily Brontë, but was credited to Ellis Bell, with her sisters, Charlotte and Anne, also writing under the male names of Currer and Acton Bell. Elizabeth Gaskell’s work was originally under the name Cotton Mather Mills. Louise May Alcott is best known for Little Women, but she’d use the genderless pseudonym, A M Barnard, to write more sensationalist works that wouldn’t have been deemed ‘proper’ for a woman.
That was often the reason. Especially with books like Wuthering Heights, which dealt with dark or scandalous subject matter, society wouldn’t easily accept that from a woman. In the language of the time, they’d be considered ‘ruined’—cast out from social circles and unlikely to be read or respected as widely as if the public believed them to be men.
When it comes to Carrie Fisher’s favourite book, the story is similar, but simply more empowered. Middlemarch is her favourite, written by a woman but credited to the name of George Eliot, the male pen name of Mary Anne Evans.
“One of the greatest books ever written by a woman, especially in those early days,” Fisher said. “Although Mary Anne Evans gave herself a male pen name, she showed incredible ambition and scope in her writing—the world she created, the characters she imagined,” Fisher added of the book and her love for it. But that was also part of the reason why Evans, or Eliot, decided to conceal her gender.
For her, it wasn’t about hiding. Under her own name, Evans was already respected in the writing world through her editorial work at The Westminster Review. She was deeply embedded in literary circles, but gender stereotypes remained pervasive, and she wanted no part of them.
She wanted to be respected for her writing, her worldbuilding, and the story she had dreamt of. She didn’t want to be bogged down by expectations of what a woman writer would or should do, or even lumped into the class of ‘women writers’ rather than just being free to exist in the broader world of literature.
The freedom comes through in her work, and Fisher especially heard it in her love for Middlemarch. “I love that line in the book that reads: ‘The really delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father, and could teach you Hebrew, if you wished it’. It was hard to be a woman in those days, but her storytelling was exceptional,” she said, able to quote her favourite lines by heart.
In the end, Evans does come to a clear conclusion about her identity, but again, it is out of a desire for empowerment. Once her debut novel, Adam Bede, began getting successful, there was a stream of people trying to take credit for it, claiming they were the person behind the pen name. Not one to let anyone, let alone random men, take credit for her work, Evans revealed herself as the writer but still kept using the name, with her grave even being marked with George Eliot.
