Anonyma’s Authors

This article examines the publication history of a popular group of loosely related, variously authored anonymous Victorian novels about women of the London “demimonde” (such as Anonyma, or, Fair but Frail, 1864), showing how successive republications worked to create an increasingly coherent set of texts with a single, yet unstable, author function. I argue specifically that these novels’ hybrid representations of authorship—which changed dramatically between the 1864, 1869, and 1884 publications of the increasingly standardized “series”—engage with the novels’ representational practices, and that an analysis of this engagement has broader implications for our understanding of Victorian ideas about authorship.