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What’s in a name? Thoughts on publishing trends

28th March 2024

What’s in a name? Thoughts on publishing trends

Thoughts on publishing trends

Over the last couple of years I have had the pleasure of reading novels that have both the first name and the surname of a woman in the title, the most recent was The Final Hours of Muriel Hinchcliffe M.B.E by Claire Parkin. It is the story of two women – frenemies, I suppose you could call them – living together and one cooky woman is looking after the other oddball character, with a real undertone of vitriol. It made for an entertaining read with a touch of Roald Dahl’s The Twits about it. But it got me thinking…..

There is a long tradition to use a woman’s full name in the title of the novel and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the story of an unconventional school mistress, is a prime (no pun intended) example. Mary Poppins by P L Travers, Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, Eleanor Rigby by Douglas Copeland and Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe, to name but a few. They use the first and surname only – in their day that deemed sufficient for the novel to have traction.

I then thought about other titles I had read with a woman’s full name, to wit The Prime of Miss Dolly Greene by E V Harte, the main character is a quirky reader of tarot cards who investigates a murder. And then the curiously titled Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman which tells the story of a woman who has built routine into her life and does not wish to stray from her ordered schedule …  And Eudora Honeysett is Quite Well, Thank You by Annie Lyons, where the protagonist’s life (at 85 years) is stirred up in a nice way by those around her and she has the opportunity to come out of herself.

It seems that just a simple first and last name is no longer in vogue but it is on trend to use an epithet in conjunction with a woman’s full name. This is clearly a new publishing trend because wherever you look, there are books with titles like The Mortification of Grace Wheeler or The Recovery of Rose Gold or The Unwrapping of Theodora Quirke.

What strikes me firstly is the overwhelming cute and odd-ball names (I mean, Eudora Honeysett, Theordora Quirke, Eleanor Oliphant?) that indicate that a character is going to be ‘different’. It’s a kind of shorthand to demonstrate before you even pick up the book that the woman at the heart of the novel will be a one-off.

Secondly, there seems to be a heavy reliance on what I might call negative words that I am beginning to feel can be just a little disparaging to women. Mad and bad, deranged or cute and quirky, the women in the stories need to ‘find’ themselves, set themselves straight, give up their quirky habits, discover who they are and peel back life. They need to come out of their shells, they need to embrace their futures and something needs to change in their lives. From Unwrapping... (what does that really mean in the context of a character on a book cover?) to Liberation .. . to Unsinkable … to titles like “Kerry Tucker Learns To Live” (and in the blurb, ‘Kerry is perfectly happy with her life’ but her sister Beth thinks otherwise…).  I am going to stick my neck out and say that at times I feel rather uncomfortable with the tenet of the ‘little, helpless, confused, woman‘ that is implicit in some of these titles, a woman who needs someone or something to turn her life around because she simply hasn’t the wherewithal to effectively run her own life.

In terms of men’s names on book covers there are titles like The Secret Life of Albert Entwistle by Matt Cain or The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce or Rodolfo Walsh’s Last Case by Elsa Drucaroff (TR: Slava Faybish) but titles with both first and last male name are, in comparison, few and far between – from what I can see.

So, are we witnessing a trend that is just a bit fun or is actually just a touch pejorative to women? A publishing trend that is ‘fun’ and ‘quirky’ but that has just the tiniest undertow of misogyny about it. Thoughts?

{Thanks to Anne Cater for sharing her database of titles]

Tina for the TripFiction Team

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