The phenomenon of anonymity has always fascinated readers and literary scholars. Borrowed from Ancient Greek ἀνώνυμος (anṓnumos), “anonymous” literally means “without a name” and is applied to works of art with an unknown authorship. The significance of anonymity as a practice for authors changed with the emergence of new concepts of authorship particularly in the wake of Romanticism. Before that shift, readers and critics’ focus was on the text itself as an object skillfully created according to established rules. But, around the turn of the nineteenth century, the text was increasingly regarded as an expression of the artist’s subjectivity and therefore personality. Particularly female anonymity in the mid- to late nineteenth century came to be regarded as a central symbol for the silencing of women in the literary world in the twentieth century, though such sweeping assertions, especially as far as they apply to women poets of the Romantic age, are a simplification of a much more complex situation.