I hope you don’t mind, but I took a little time off in August from work and the search. Mainly to have a little respite from the project when it’s all been so busy (there was also the pilot performance of my play Blessing in Burslem at the 3rd Potteries Chartist festival), but also to offer some more needed thinking time about something that had cropped up in early August: the use of the pseudonym.
This has been both a fascinating and frustrating turn up for the books (!); hearing or finding a new author only to discover they are someone else we have already found and who turns out to be (unfortunately) not Potteries-born. For example, the author Lys Holland whose novel ‘Sing no Sad Songs’ (published by Robert Hale in 1983) sits in the Archives as a possible candidate. A little more delving finds this to be the penname of Dilys Gater, a writer of some immense prolificity, and born in North Wales.
Similarly, those fine folk at Stoke Archives did some digging for me on Laura Grayson, another Robert Hale published author who wrote ‘The Silver Thimble’ (1979), only to find her real name was Barbara Wilson, born in Nantwich. As the newspaper clipping below says, Barbara thought that changing her name would get her published.
We are still trying to get to the birthplace bottom of Marina Oliver, yet another Robert Hale author who published historical romances under that name in 1974 but switched to the pseudonym of Sally James in 1977. In 1981, she published a novel as Donna Hunt at Minstrel Books. Since 1983, she uses the pen-name Bridget Thorn. In 1992, she also published a novel as Vesta Hathaway and in 2000 as Laura Hart. Keeping up?! She has published more than fifty novels under her name and her pseudonyms, plus half a dozen non-fiction books. It’s no wonder we can’t yet pin her down to claim her as Potteries-born.
What is also frustrating is that given that we already know that Cedric Beardmore also published under the names George Beardmore and George Wolfenden (the pen name he gave for the publication of The Little Doves of Destruction in 1942), as the contemporary crime writer Mel Sherratt is also the romantic novelist Marcie Steele, what we first thought to be a specific year filled with a homegrown author is now actually another gap to fill.
When you start projects like this, you try very hard to think of everything that might derail your research, skew the data, and disrupt the objectives. Though I had wondered for the use of the pseudonym given the early part of the century we were looking at, I had not fully considered the concept of multiple pseudonyms affecting the canon search so disruptively.
There are and have been numerous reasons why a writer uses a pseudonym and hide the self behind the text. Aliases and alter-egos have been used for centuries be it for self-effacement, privacy, to fuel public curiosity or, as it was in the 18th and 19th centuries, to mask gender. Jane Austen was famously ‘published by Lady A’ as the Brontes veiled their identities by assuming the androgynous pseudonyms Acton, Currer and Ellis Bell so that their work would be accepted and read by the patriarchal reading and publishing class. I’m also referencing a 1924 essay by Virginia Woolf for the purpose of these blogs who refers to herself in this work by her married name, Mrs Brown; done so as part of her intention to show how it’s human nature to shift identities as human nature shifts identities too as one era ends and another begins.
To have these women authors then like Barbara Wilson and Marina Oliver working under pseudonyms in the mid-20th century where gendered authorship was neither problematic nor dismissed, warrants further investigation. Similarly, you have to ask why Cedric/George Beardmore chose Wolfenden in the latter part of his literary career when this distances him from his earlier works, proffers a sense of authorship inconsistency, and yet all in an era when his gender was not problematic. We can understand why Mel Sherratt uses her 2 names to identify with the 2 genres separating romance and crime, but Wilson and Oliver, as Robert Hale published authors with what seem like lucrative historical romance novel careers, continued to shift identities and reinvent themselves throughout their literary careers.
When I was first published, I never thought to change my name nor was I asked how I wanted to be known as a writer. I’d won a national competition. I found out on the Tuesday and was published in the Guardian’s magazine on the Saturday. I was so overwhelmed by winning that I never gave a thought to my name or ‘who’ I wanted to be known as, as a writer. Cannier writer friends I’ve come to know have author names as separate to birth names, as many other authors will simply use their initials, J.K. Rowling perhaps the most famous to do so. Only once, at an event, have I been asked if my surname is hindering.
Even so, these are the sorts of interesting questions and diversions that searching for 100 Books in 100 Years is producing. Once the canon’s official search in the centenary year is formally over, we can start pursuing these questions to probe more deeply into these matters of authorship and find out how it all lends to this city’s literary heritage. In the meantime, if you know any information about these Robert Hales published female authors please do get in touch: 100potteriesbooks@gmail.com
Get Stoked about Writing
As I’m shining a narrative spotlight on Burslem born poet Pauline Stainer this month, I thought it would be apt to use one of Stainer’s poems ‘Scarecrow’ as a prompt.
It’s an apt poem for the time of year, when the light changes, the days shorten, the nights draw in and the last of the harvest is collected before winter hibernation. It’s also apt when you consider it in terms of what is and what is not – not dissimilar to the season change that occurs at this time of year – and what might lie at the heart of Scarecrow’s identity; there to scare as a vital form of protection over crops but also there for the decline then an often left behind reminder of what had been.
Scarecrow then is your prompt: a figure of dual identity, not real yet lifelike, solitary yet covered in birds, liked by some, too scary for others, and wearing human clothing that has been cast off. How might you use the scarecrow as an analogy and what might it represent or identify with? Perhaps think of the different names you could give it. Maybe there is a regional or family name given to a scarecrow to personalise or de-personalise its presence. Give it a go as a poem, or maybe try it out as a short story.
Pauline Stainer | Bloodaxe Books
19th September 2025
