Anonymous Was a Woman

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.

By Fred R. Shapiro, Yale Alumni Magazine