Why Do Women Writers Change Their Names?

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin became... Mary Shelley.

Mary Ann Evans became... George Eliot.

Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller became... Agatha Christie.

Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya became... Teffi.

Edith Eva Elefánt became... Edith Eger.

Eva Geiringer became... Eva Schloss.

Virginia Stephen became… the fearsome Virginia Woolf.

There are several reasons:

• Women writers get married

• They want a catchy pen name

• They want to avoid gender/race/nationality-based prejudice

• ALL OF THE ABOVE

The first reason is getting less and less common overall. While in the 1990s the number of women who took their husband's name was 82%, a 2013 study by Facebook showed that the number has dropped to 63%. So I am going against the trend. I used to be pro-maiden name while I was a researcher and publishing articles under my original surname. But now I am in need of a catchy pen name – why not use the name I’m related to by marriage? After 17 years of spelling my husband’s family name to various doctors, schools, and hotel receptionists, it has grown on me. It doesn’t feel entirely foreign, as in “alien to my sense of self”. In fact, it feels almost mine. I even get angry when people pronounce it the wrong way (the correct way is with the stress on the third syllable – pla-ta-NEE-a). I’ve become a real Platania fan.

And it’s catchy, especially combined with my first name, which I would never change. Da-ri-a Pla-ta-ni-a. There is a nice assonance with lots of “-a” sounds.

But let’s get back to the previous point – prejudice. I don’t care about prejudice – prejudice is what makes us stronger. That’s why even when I was qualifying as a teacher of English (!) language and literature, I didn’t change my name: what’s the point if I am obviously not English. For me, the main problem with my maiden name was not that it is Russian – it is just so… religious. It is all about popes, and priests, and protopopes, which used to mean archpriest in the Orthodox church. I honestly don’t know how my grandparents lived with it during the militantly atheist Soviet times… Imagine being called Protopopova... The daughter of the archpriest... As a child, I was teased because of that by my clueless classmates. That made me stronger. I am now fully prepared to talk about popes if you ask me to. But this is not who I am as a writer.

I am no longer writing about the Soviet past, or the Communist trauma, or where I am from. I am writing about the present – family relationships in modern Europe, being a woman, Planet Earth. Of course, these things are shaped by our past, but I want to talk about today and tomorrow. Our future. I want the wars to stop. I want people to start planning happy things. I want Planet Earth to become our top priority. I want to plant flowers for bees and to rescue dogs. And to write funny stories under my new pen name. To life! Or, alla vita!