By a Lady: Making the Most of Identity in Creative Writing

Professor Pauline Kaldas

In every class I have ever had with Professor Pauline Kaldas, I have been required to include a reflection essay with my semester-end portfolio.  Although I have been rather un-creative with these essays in the past, I decided this semester to make the piece part of the portfolio itself, rather than just a bland statement citing what I learned through this spring.  For those of you who have not yet had a class with Professor Kaldas but have an opportunity to do so, I suggest you do.  I recently named her as my new adviser when I was informed my adviser would be retiring.  She is an excellent mentor, accepting, kind, intelligent, creative, and everything you could ever want in a professor.  It is because of her work as a professor that I am able to write as well as I do (though I do not claim to be any great writer -- only that my improvement is very much due to my interaction with her).  Therefore, I offer you this semester's reflection.

When Jane Austen and her family originally published many of her works, the line beneath the titles frequently read “By a Lady.”  While this was likely done, at least in some part, to save her reputation (as society continued to frown upon women writers at the time), I appreciate another meaning this byline now holds.  Two centuries later, “By a Lady” means so much more – the line of credit acknowledges a sisterhood among women writers while taking ownership of and pride in being a woman in a man’s world.  Austen and her publishers might have decided to release her work under “Anonymous.”  After all, in A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf asserted, “I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”  However, the printers laid out the letters and so “a Lady” remains the author of such classic works as Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, thus allowing women writers like myself to publish under our own names today.

I have, while continuing to improve my writing through practice, workshops, and reading others’ writing, attempted to keep Austen and other foremothers in mind.  In surveying a list of multicultural literature, I have come to realize that I am now part of this collection of authors who might have been Anonymous were it not for Austen and others like her.  Though we still very much live in a man’s world, women writers continue to hold and important presence.  Once these women writers claim their place in the domain of literature, they are free to explore other positions they maintain.  Thus we have British women writers, physically challenged women writers, lesbian writers, Latina writers, and a number of other women who represent a community in addition to the circle of women writers.

Once I grasped and owned the title of a woman writer, I looked to other places in my life for identities.  I found I was a daughter, a sister, a girlfriend, a student, a white New Englander, and a twenty-something writer.  These were not labels I needed to come into or earn.  I did not have to write about being a daughter or a girlfriend or white New Englander in order for those themes to be present in my writing.  Instead, because I was the one writing, my essays inherited the perspective of all these labels.  I do not need to identify these tags for them to be present in whatever writing I might produce.

You hold an arsenal of identities that manifest
in your writing.  The more you are aware of them
the more you can use them to your advantage.

This recognition opened a whole battery of writing material.  I could, if I chose, write about being a sister, a student, or a twenty-something and still be confident that whatever perspective I decided to ignore in a particular piece would still appear.  Just by writing, I am able to encapsulate a collection of subjects, regardless of the stated focus.  If, however, writers take the time to recognize the arsenal of titles they hold in their lives, the sheer amount of material which presents itself may be overwhelming.  The number of available topics in any writer’s life is far greater than they might realize. 

The responsibility that comes with owning these titles publicly, too, is great.  For in addition to being men, women, non-binaries, teens, forty-somethings, students, New Englanders, and whatever else a writer might be, as long as at least one person reads what they have written, they will always be shapers and influencers.

That the number of titles we hold, however informal they may be, indicates several specific communities and unique understandings about which to write, can only encourage writers not only to write more, but to do more, be more, experience more.  The wealth of a life well-lived makes the poorest writers the richest.  Their gardens of fodder boast not just their native roots, but perhaps spices from foreign lands, grains from other times, vegetables from hidden communities, and fruits from years of labor. This is what makes a multicultural writer.

Image of Professor Kaldas courtesy of Packet-Media.
Image of masks courtesy of Graphic Design Ideas.