Comment on this article
Anonymous was a Woman
Your favorite famous quotation: was it by Voltaire? Yogi Berra? Or some woman you’ve never heard of?
January/February 2011
by Fred R. Shapiro
Fred R. Shapiro, the Yale Alumni Magazine’s quotations columnist, is editor of the Yale Book of Quotations (Yale University Press).
I would venture to guess that Anon,
who wrote so many poems without signing them,
was often a woman.
—Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Virginia Woolf wrote those words about the entire realm of literary creation, not about that special subset of it called "quotations"—the minting of concise snippets so eloquent or insightful as to be memorable. But those of us who dig deeply for the earliest sources of well-known lines discover, time and again, that here, too, Woolf was right: Anonymous was a woman. Many of the great quotesmiths have been women who are now forgotten or whose wit and wisdom are erroneously credited to more-famous men.
Scholars of sociology, history, psychology, women’s studies, and other fields, not to mention writers and thinkers like Woolf herself, have written about why this should be so. I won’t seek to tackle that question here. Instead, I present the raw material—or, rather, the fraction of it we know.
The authorship of some of these phrases had been forgotten for years or decades before being unearthed by a researcher. In other cases, the authors were never "lost"—their names have long been known to specialists and can be easily found with a little research—yet they are mostly unknown to the general public. Moreover, the real authors are often obscured by inaccurate attributions that have gained wide currency.
Finally, a few of these lines were crafted by women who are anonymous partly because they worked in professions that tend to be anonymous, such as screenwriting or speechwriting. I’ve included them nevertheless, because they show the range and depth of well-known quotations by women. The hallmark of almost all these cases, in fact, is that people are surprised to learn that such famous lines were written by such obscure women.
The quotations here are grouped in two categories: the misattributed and the forgotten. Within each category, they are listed chronologically. And after the lists, I offer one more surprise. As it turns out, there have often been anonymous women behind the enterprise of quotation collecting itself—even behind the most iconic male name.
The Misattributed
He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much; who has enjoyed the trust of pure women, the respect of intelligent men, and the love of little children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who has left the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who has never lacked appreciation of earth’s beauty or failed to express it; who has always looked for the best in others and given them the best he had; whose life was an inspiration; whose memory is a benediction.
This passage is often said to be by Ralph Waldo Emerson or Robert Louis Stevenson. In fact, it was written by Bessie A. Stanley of Lincoln, Kansas, in 1905. She earned $250 as the first-prize winner in a contest sponsored by the magazine Modern Women.
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
The French philosopher Voltaire is widely credited for what may be the most celebrated quotation about freedom of speech. Bartlett's lists it under his name, calling it a paraphrase from his letter to a M. le Riche, February 6, 1770—but that attribution was based on a misreading. The quote does not appear in Voltaire’s letter to François-Louis-Henri Leriche of that date, nor anywhere else in Voltaire’s works. The real writer was Evelyn Beatrice Hall (1868–1919), English author of The Friends of Voltaire, a book she published in 1906 under the pseudonym S. G. Tallentyre. The illustrious line is Hall’s own characterization of Voltaire’s attitude. Discussing a book by one of his friends, she explains that even though he had thought the work rather light, he rose to its defense when it was censored.
Iron curtain
This term became basic to world politics after Winston Churchill used it in a 1946 speech, referring to the political divide between the Soviet Union and the nations it dominated, on the one hand, and the rest of the world, on the other. But Ethel Snowden (1881–1951), an English suffragette, used it in this sense much earlier, in her 1920 book Through Bolshevik Russia: "We were behind the ‘iron curtain’ at last!”
The only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money.
Ernest Hemingway famously wrote in his short story "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" (1936), "He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of [the rich] and how he had started a story once that began, 'The very rich are different from you and me.' And how someone had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money." Hemingway’s celebrated putdown of Fitzgerald, however, was derived from a witticism another writer had directed at Hemingway himself. According to Matthew J. Bruccoli’s Scott and Ernest, Hemingway commented at a lunch in 1936, "I am getting to know the rich." Mary Colum (1884–1957), an Irish literary critic, replied, "The only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money.”
Now I know why nobody ever comes here; it’s too crowded.
Yogi Berra had a gift for pronouncements that are nonsensical in literal terms yet make perfect sense. This one is included in several Internet compilations of his aphorisms—but its first use was in 1941, when Yogi was only 16. It appeared in the Helena Independent, a Montana newspaper; the writer attributed it to a "flutterbrained cutie named Suzanne Ridgeway.”
We will overcome.
Pete Seeger is the artist indelibly associated with the use of this gospel song as the anthem of protest movements, most particularly the civil rights movement. It was a woman named Lucille Simmons, however, who first made it a protest song. During a 1946 strike against the American Tobacco Company in Charleston, she sang her own version of the song many days on the picket line. When Seeger adopted it a few years later, his major change was altering "will" to "shall.”
Just say the lines and don’t trip over the furniture.
The classic advice to actors is usually ascribed to Noël Coward, who is said to have uttered it during the run of his play Nude with Violin (1956–8). But the famed stage star Lynn Fontanne (1887–1983) has a prior claim. In Best Quotes of '54, '55, '56(published in 1957), James B. Simpson gives the date 1954 for Fontanne’s definition of acting: "We move about the stage without bumping into the furniture or each other.”
If you make it here, you make it anywhere.
The celebrated lyrics by Fred Ebb are from 1977: "If I can make it there / I’ll make it anywhere / It’s up to you, New York, New York." But in 1959, the New York Times quoted actress Julie Newmar (born 1933) saying the words above—prefaced by "That’s why I came to New York." (Newmar introduced another well-known expression in 1964, when her robot character Rhoda, in the television show My Living Doll, used the catchphrase "That does not compute." Her most famous role was as Catwoman in the Batman TV series.)
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.
These words appear in the book A Return to Love (1992), by Marianne Williamson (born 1952), a spiritual activist and author. Their frequent attribution to a 1994 Nelson Mandela inaugural address is completely erroneous.
The Forgotten
No time like the present.
This phrase has become so common that many people assume it is a proverb. In the familiar form quoted here, it originated with Mary de la Rivière Manley (1663–1724), an English novelist and playwright, who used it in her 1696 play The Lost Lover.
No man is a hero to his valet.
It was Anne-Marie Bigot de Cornuel (1614–1694), the hostess of a Parisian salon and a much-cited wit, who made this quip about the indignities of familiarity. We know her as the source because of a 1728 letter written by another Parisian, who quoted Cornuel years after her death: “Il n'y avoit point de héros pour les valets de chambre.”
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are!
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky!
The ditty now sung by every English-speaking three-year-old was published in 1806 in Rhymes for the Nursery, by Ann Taylor (1782–1866) and Jane Taylor (1783–1824), English sisters and the coauthors of several books of children’s poems. These four lines are the opening lines of "The Star." Though the poems lack individual bylines, both Ann’s son and the sisters' nephew later said Jane was the author.
Mary had a little lamb,
Its fleece was white as snow,
And everywhere that Mary went
The lamb was sure to go.
The first words recorded on Thomas Edison’s phonograph were the words of this ubiquitous poem. "Mary’s Lamb" was written by Sarah Josepha Hale (1788–1879), one of the first major U.S. female writers and a hugely influential editor of women’s magazines. She also led the campaign to make Thanksgiving a national holiday.
Laugh and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone.
Proverb? No, this too was written by a woman, an American named Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850–1919). Her 1883 poem "Solitude" begins with these words.
Does it really matter what these affectionate people do—so long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses!
Online, one can find this remark credited to King Edward VII and an eighteenth-century general, as well as to the person with the best claim: Mrs. Patrick Campbell (Beatrice Stella Tanner Campbell, 1865–1940), the preeminent actress of her time on the London stage. She used this memorable line in rebuking an actress who had complained that an actor they knew was enamored of a young leading man.
Oh, no. It wasn’t the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast.
These lines, spoken by Robert Armstrong at the end of King Kong (1933), are among the most famous in the history of cinema. They can be ascribed to the U.S. writer Ruth Rose (1896–1978). She and James Creelman received joint credit for the Kong screenplay, but she wrote the final script and rewrote all of Creelman’s dialogue.
War is not healthy for children and other living things.
This ubiquitous slogan of the Vietnam War era originated on a poster by U.S. artist Lorraine Schneider (1925–72).
E.T. phone home.
The American Film Institute ranks this line 15th among the top 100 quotations of U.S. cinema. The screenwriter for E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) was Melissa Mathison (b. 1950).
Two Whodunits: Bartlett's and the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
Webster’s dictionary. Roget’s thesaurus. Bartlett’s quotations. These are the eponymous giants of the reference world. John Bartlett, owner of the University Bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts, published A Collection of Familiar Quotations, with Complete Indices of Authors and Subjects in 1855. The current edition is the 17th; its title has evolved into Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations: A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced to Their Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature. The book’s impact has been pervasive. Winston Churchill himself praised it in his autobiography: "an admirable work, and I studied it intently.”
When I began work on the Yale Book of Quotations, I found that, despite its subtitle, Bartlett's shows little evidence of research into the origins of its quotations. And in 2003, Michael Hancher '67PhD, an English professor at the University of Minnesota and president of the Dictionary Society of North America, published an article in the Harvard Library Bulletin showing that the very name "Bartlett's" is a questionable credit.
John Bartlett is generally supposed to have drawn the quotations in his book from his own extensive reading and prodigious memory and a commonplace book he kept. But he acknowledged in the 1855 preface that "this Collection … has been considerably enlarged by additions from an English work on a similar plan." That work, Hancher found, was named in some reviews of the time as the Handbook of Familiar Quotations from English Authors (London, 1853).
Bartlett’s first edition closely tracked the quotations in the Handbook. Moreover, it expressed similar ambitions in its preface, used the same chronological organization, and had a comparable index, design, and layout. It is notable that, although Bartlett was an American and his book was published in the United States, fewer than 5 percent of the quotations were American.
But who was responsible for the Handbook? Here, Hancher ran into a puzzle. There is no editor’s name on the title page. There is, however, a note at the front. It begins:
This Collection was originally intended for the amusement of a family-circle, without any idea of publication. It was only when the Compiler found how many well-read persons were unable to name the author of even the most familiar passage that it occurred to her to supply, by a work of reference, what appeared to be a desideratum in our literature.
The Compiler mentions her residence—at Southwick Place, a fashionable address in London—but signed the note only with her initials: I. R. P.
Hancher deduced from the note that I. R. P. was "no professional author." Yet she was "au courant with the work of the Statistical Society," and for her book she was "able to enlist the services of John Murray, one of the most prestigious publishers in London." Then Hancher examined one of the few known first editions, at the British Library. Next to the initials at the end of the preface, someone had written: "Preston?”
When he consulted the John Murray archives, he found a ledger that lists the author of the Handbook as Isabella Rushton Preston. He also found her letters to Murray. In her first letter, dated April 17, 1849, she had sent him 16 quotations and suggested that "perhaps even Mr. Murray, conversant as he is with our literature, may not be able at once to say from whence they came." From that beginning came her book, which sold thousands of copies. The only other information Hancher could find about Preston’s life was in the London census, which showed that in 1851 she was 43 years old and living with her widowed mother, her half-brother, and three servants. In 1861 she was still alive. But that is the last we know of her.
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, we see, has a somewhat shadowy editorial provenance. It would be too much of a coincidence, surely, for the other leading traditional quotations book, the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, to have its own story of a female compiler receiving little credit. Yet that is exactly what I find.
Today’s ODQ gives the name of its editor, Elizabeth Knowles, on the title page. But the title page of the first edition (1941) gives no editor’s name. The person most identified with that edition is the writer Bernard Darwin; his contribution, however, was the introduction. Knowles wrote a "History of the Dictionary" for the current edition (2009), but she nowhere identifies the original editor.
Yet in a section of front matter in the first edition entitled "The Compilers to the Reader," we do find the following: "The work remained in contemplation for some time before it began to take shape under the general editorship of Miss Alice Mary Smyth, who worked, for purposes of selection, with a small committee formed of members of the [Oxford University] Press itself." This is the only mention of Smyth I’ve discovered in any edition.
Who was Alice Mary Smyth? She lived from 1908 to 1989 and was a writer, an editor, and the librarian at Oxford University Press. She married the writer and publisher Charles Hadfield. In all, she wrote and edited more than a dozen books for adults and children. She received more professional recognition in her lifetime than did Isabella Rushton Preston. But, as with Preston, her major role in creating a quotations reference has been greatly neglected.
Although I am tempted to tell you that my own quotations book was secretly compiled by a woman, that was not the case. My excellent senior research editors included Jane Garry, Denise Montgomery, and Suzanne Watkins, but for the most part it was a male-edited work. In that respect, it might almost be considered a novelty.
Anonymous was—not always, but far too often—a woman. 
|
