Perhaps we are asking the wrong questions.

In Barthes's "The Death of the Author" we learn the text exists without the author. “Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where out subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing” (Barry, 185). By this, Barthes explains that writing has no meaning, and the reader may associate the author to the text, trying to find a definite meaning with restrictions and boundaries.


Overall, the text has no one defined meaning or explanation. However, when the reader focuses on the author of the text, we add meaning behind writing that does not exist. Certain experiences of the author, such as their life history or the time period the text was written alters the affect of the text. “The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions while criticism still consists for the most part in saying that Baudelaire’s work is the failure of Baudelaire the man…” With this, the reader must look at the impact of the text, not the impact of the author on the text. The author or scripter has the purpose of scripting the text that is all.

Dr. Crazy, a fellow blogger brings up interesting points on this topic. “But, historically, anonymity has been about effacing one's identity even as one writes. Now, Virginia Woolf famously suggests in A Room of One's Own that "Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was a woman" (49). Maybe this is the place where the problem with distinguishing between anonymity and pseudonymity begins, as in making this claim; Woolf assigns an identity to the anonymous writer.”


With that being said, Virginia Woolf is using the assumptions she has created about the author to decide the poems are written by a woman. She is identifying the text with the idea that the author was female, altering the outcome of her experience of the text.

"But words are things, and a small drop of ink, Falling, like dew, upon a thought produces That which makes thousands, perhaps millions think. "
-Lord Byron