Article: Guessing games

Article from:
New Statesman
Article date:
February 11, 2008
Author:
Copyright

The ideas corner * Anonymity

John Mullan recalls that curiosity and concealment have a grand literary history

Sometimes a news item brings back to life what was for centuries an essential habit of readers and critics: guessing at the identity of a hidden author. Today, where anonymity provokes widespread curiosity, it is usually via the internet and often in connection with sexual confessions. Recently there was the media hunt for "Belle de Jour", author of the supposed memoir of a happy hooker, and the outing of Zoe Margolis as the anonymous writer of a blog of sexual adventures that became the book Girl With a One-Track Mind. It isn't always sex. The coup of Primary Colors, the ...

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