Focusing on the recovery of the textual and authoriality-defining politics of Charlotte Brontë's pseudonym 'Currer Bell', this essay examines how Charlotte's penname affected pre-1850 constructions of gendered authorial identity and how, after that date, Currer Bell was partially erased by means of the two distinct personae that readers fashioned for Charlotte, the female author, and Charlotte, the historical figure. The essay explores the pseudonym's redefinition and revaluation by means of an analysis of brief accounts of Charlotte's correspondence and the reviews of her fiction. It also examines how the use of different personae by Charlotte and critics of her works contributed to a myth that conflated distinctions she had introduced to differentiate herself as writer, using the gender-ambiguous remit of Currer Bell, and as the private individual Charlotte Brontë. The essay concludes with a consideration of how Charlotte's textual inscription is transformed by visual culture media, which facilitated her becoming a cultural icon.keywords authorship, Charlotte Brontë, cultural icon, popular and critical afterlife, pseudonym Too little attention has been given to the study of the pseudonym that Charlotte Brontë adopted at the beginning of her writing career and what this particular authorship practice can tell us about her personality. Textual and narratological studies have facilitated sophisticated analyses of the construction of authorship and the ways in which the authorship function of pseudonyms can inform readings of literary texts. 1 The key to understanding Charlotte's professional life lies in the pseudonym of Currer Bell, and it is the relationship between this name and Charlotte's identity and character that promises to correct misconceptions of the historical, rather than the mythified, Charlotte Brontë. Before 1850 readers would have been familiar with the names of Currer, Acton and Ellis Bell as the authors of prominent novels in the late 1840s. They would not have known that these names were pseudonyms. The erasure of the significance of Charlotte Brontë's pseudonym, which has (partially) occurred in her critical afterlife, and especially in the undergraduate syllabus and introductory works to Victorian fiction promoting biographical readings of texts,

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In a reading of James Thomson's The Seasons that largely draws on the history of the book and the fields of print culture and illustration studies, I offer a narrative of the changing interpretation of the poem between 1730 and 1797. Not only did readers, in response to changes in zeitgeist, alter their consumption and reading practices of the text, but they also interpreted the poem by translating it into a range of different media such as furniture prints, porcelain designs, sculpture, and book illustrations. I shall examine different responses to Thomson's poem by discussing a number of illustrations that were printed in editions, published both in London and the newly emerging regional publishing centers but disseminated across Britain. Apart from documenting the representational shift from depicting the poem as theodicy to reading it as a narrative of nature and domesticity, I shall relate my discussion of the illustrations to changes in technology, the reading revolution, and the skillful marketing strategies of both cheaply produced and luxurious editions of The Seasons in the late eighteenth century. By contextualizing the production within a new midcentury book trade that catered to different classes of readers, the essay makes a contribution to understanding Thomson's text as a cultural classic of iconic significance that was being reinvented (in ever new media and interpretations) throughout the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the ninteenth centuries.