Moustache De Plume - Television Tropes & Idioms

Totally not a woman.

There exists a belief that novels written by women won't sell as well. Perhaps it's the stereotype that women tend to write domestic novels or "fluff" that have very narrow appeal. Perhaps it's because historically 90% of the works considered the great masterpieces of the literary canon are written by men. Perhaps it's because certain fandoms (Speculative Fiction for instance) are predominantly male and publishers assume these men won't take books by female authors seriously.

However, this has not stopped many women from writing and successfully publishing their works. They just have to pull small sleight of hand: conceal their gender. Since authors are usually not on film and therefore not seen, this can be done simply by adopting a pen name. Typically, female authors take one of two approaches.

Shortening their name to a series of initials which are gender ambiguous.
Adopting a completely male name to outright fool the public.

Note: Sometimes highly successful female authors will create a Moustache De Plume if they are publishing a type of book well outside their normal material. For instance, Nora Roberts (a romance novelist) published mystery books under the pseudonym J.D. Robb. See Same Face Different Name.

Note 2: This trope is not for the likes of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, or H.P. Lovecraft because they weren't using initials to conceal their genders.

Examples:

J.K. Rowling, at the demand of a publisher (she doesn't really even have a middle name). Although by now nobody is mistaking her for a guy.
- This troper actually ran into someone who did, well after the seventh book was published.
K.A. (Katherine Alice) Applegate.
George Eliot is the famous pen name of Mary Anne Evans, contemporary (and sometimes rival) of Charles Dickens. She famously authored Middlemarch and Silas Marner. She adopted the name to ensure she would be taken seriously as an author, instead of being considered a writer of sappy Romantics (and sometimes plain ol' Romances), as most female authors of the time.
- She also penned the essay "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists," which criticizes (hilariously) the typical sappy romances of the time.
James Tiptree Jr. a.k.a. Alice Sheldon (also AKA Raccoona Sheldon)
George Sand
E.L. Konigsburg
S.E. Hinton
P.L. Travers
P.D. James
C.J. Cherryh, who also added a silent "h" to the end of her last name to differentiate herself from her SF artist brother David Cherry.
- There was also a tendency by less-than-attentive bookstore workers to put her books with the romances before the "h" was added.
Julian May (her real name, but she has also published under "Ian Thorne", "J.C. May" and "Lee N. Falconer".
Robin Hobb (more Gender Blender Name than outright male but serves the same purpose).
John Sedges, aka Pearl S. Buck. And this was after she won the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes.
Andre Norton
Inversion: Anne Rice, whose birth name was Howard Allen O'Brien. (Though that's more to do with a wacky name her parents gave her...)
- Although she has also published books under the name A.N. Roquelaure.
S.D. Tower
Henry Handel Richardson (real name: Ethel Florence Lindsay Richardson) adopted a male name because of the difficulties 19th century women faced in getting published.
Similarly, Mary Shelley first published Frankenstein under her husband's name.
All the Bronte sisters originally published their stories under male pseudonyms. (Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, for Charlotte, Emily, and Anne.)
- Sent up in Cold Comfort Farm where the male intellectual Mr. "Maybug" Mayerberg, indignant that so many of England's greatest novels were written by girlies that he writes a thesis claiming that they were all drunks and druggies and their brother Branwell (who was the drunk and druggie of the family in real life) wrote all their stories for them.
Ursula K. Le Guin's first publisher had her credited as U. Le Guin. She got rather upset when she realised that her middle initial was omitted because K is more common as a female initial than a male one, and female SF authors were rare in the 60s. She changed to the current version of her name shortly afterwards.
C.L. (Catherine Lucille) Moore.
Holy Bibble [1]. Don't be fooled by the avatars of the two authors, they are two girls (and if you look at each avatar closely, there's a girl hidden behind a boy)
D. C. Fontana
K.J. Parker
C.S. Friedman changed to Celia Friedman in her most recent works and reeditions.
J.V. Jones
It has been rumored that Hiromu Arakawa's (the author and artist of the Fullmetal Alchemist manga) real first name is Hiromi. But what is known is that her gender remained ambiguous in the early stages of FMA, and then through interviews and the like, eventually became common knowledge.
Karen Blixen published her works under the pen name of Isak Dinesen (Dinesen was her maiden name).
Rob Thurman is really a Robyn, female.
Nelle Harper Lee
Stella Miles Franklin
J.T. Leroy, although this was an entire invented persona rather than simply an attempt to conceal her gender alone.
R. M. Meluch
The writer of the popular ambulance control centre blog Nee Naw admitted they were using pseudonyms for anonymity reasons. Still, it was a shock when 'Mike Myers' revealed that he was actually a 'Suzi Brent'.
J. O. Jeppson, later to use her married name, Janet Asimov.
D. C. (Dana Claire) Simpson. Some justification for this as Simpson is transsexual and initially self-published under her birth name of David Craig Simpson.
"The" poet Michael Field (actually two women, Katherine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper).
Short-story author George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright).
Novelist and playwright John Oliver Hobbes (Pearl S. Craigie).
Science fiction novelist Ann C. Crispin's best-known works, the Han Solo Trilogy from the Star Wars Expanded Universe, were published as A. C. Crispin, though the "About The Author" section clearly had her as Ann C. Crispin.
Ellis Peters, author of the Brother Cadfael books, was really Edith Pargeter. She also published less-famous mystery novels as Peter Benedict, Jolyon Carr and John Redfern.
Neither of Chris Moriarty's books have any sort of identifying pronouns in either the endorsement blurbs or the author bio. I emailed her and she confirmed that that omission, along with the ambiguous first name, as a deliberate decision by the editors.
Several authors of Star Trek fiction—in addition to D. C. Fontana and A. C. Crispin mentioned above, there are J. A. Lawrence (Judith), M. S. Murdock (Melinda), J. M. Dillard (Jeanne), V. E. Mitchell (Vicki), L. A. Graf (a joint pseudonym for two women, Karen Rose Cercone and Julia Ecklar), S. D. Perry (Stephani), and S. N. Lewitt (Shariann).

Inversions (Womb de Plume? Shaved Moustache?):

This sort of thing generally happens to male novelists who want to write romance novels.
- Gardner Fox, the creator of The Flash, the Justice Society Of America, and the Justice League Of America, wrote romance novels under the pen name Lynna Cooper.
- Peter O'Donnell, the creator of Modesty Blaise, wrote romance novels as Madeleine Brent.
- Romance novelist Leigh Greenwood is male. Greenwood actually uses his real name; however, it certainly helps that the spelling "Leigh" is traditionally thought of as feminine.
- There are also married couples who publish under the wife's name or a female pseudonym.
Michael Hardcastle wrote books about football for boys. He also wrote books for girls about horses, but under a woman's name so they wouldn't think the books were aimed at boys.
The young children's author Martin Waddell wrote his earlier YA books, which often have female protagonists, under the name Catherine Sefton. He now writes YA under his own name as well.
L. Frank Baum wrote romances under a female pseudonym.
Both male and female writers wrote Nancy Drew novels under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene.
Accidental example: One of Terry Pratchett's early [[Discworld]] books, Equal Rites, was adapted for BBC Radio's Woman's Hour. Given that the book centres on feminism, many listeners assumed the author was in fact a woman named "Terri Pratchett".
The poet Fiona Mac Leod (William Sharp).
Tim Pratt, the author of The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, wrote his Marla Mason fantasy series as T.A. Pratt.
Dan Brown's first book was a toilet volume called 187 Men To Avoid, written under the name Danielle Brown.
Michael Grant, K. A. Applegate's husband, wrote several of the Animorphs books under his wife's (pen)name.

Fictional examples:

K.C. Hunter, Kira's counterpart in the Star Trek Deep Space Nine Elseworld of 1950s science fiction writers, who's pretty clearly based on C. L. Moore (with Bashir's counterpart as Henry Kuttner).
- This is also likely a tribute to the aforementioned Dorothy Charlotte "D.C." Fontana, who was a 1960s Science Fiction writer for Star Trek, who originally started as Gene Rodenberry's secretary. She went by D.C. of course to avoid the stigma of being a female writer, and wrote some of the most well known episodes of the show, as well as the only episode of the Star Trek Animated Series that is canon.
Webcomic example: This Casey And Andy strip.
In Nim's Island, Alex Rover, an Indiana Jones type character who writes novels about his exciting adventures, is actually Alexandra Rover, neurotic female author.
An episode of the Canadian show Radio Active involved a guest speaker who was a woman who had been pretending to be a man to get into writing. It turned out to not be the woman pictured on the back of the book, but their English Teacher, who explains that she had to to pretend to be an attractive woman pretending to be a man to be able to get anywhere in writing.
How could you not mention Jessica J.B. Fletcher
In Darren Shan's third book of The Demonata, there is a movie producer named David A. Haym. Who is actually named Davida Haym.
KL Going.
Not an author, but an example nonetheless: In the original japanese release of Gunsmith Cats, according to Word Of God, female bounty hunter Rally Vincent's name is actually pronounced as Larry. It's hinted, at least in one page of the manga, that she took this name so that those seeking to hire a bounty hunter would think she was a man, and thus take her seriously.

Fictional inversions:

Henry Fitzroy of the Blood Books writes romances under the psuedonym "Elizabeth Fitzroy." Since he's the bastard son of Henry the 8th, he thinks that's pretty amusing.
In the anime Ef: A Tale of Memories, Hirono Hiro, 17 year-old male who is a professional mangaka, writes under the pen name Shindou Nagi, claiming to be female. Given that his work is shoujo, it's understandable.
In the Blackadder episode "Ink and Incapability", the protagonist writes Edmund: A Butler's Tale under the name Gertrude Perkins, because everyone wants books by women nowadays. He claims that Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen and Dorothy Wordsworth are all men, Austen being a "a huge Yorkshireman with a beard like a rhododendron bush".
- "James Boswell is the only real woman writing at the moment, and that's just because she wants to get inside Johnson's britches."
Artemis Fowl, at least according to his inner monologue, has been writing romance novels under the name Violet Tsirblou since age ten, if not longer.
- Which is odd, considering that Artemis is a girl's name.