The thing about it is, also in reply to of George Eliot below by steerpike, is that, I'm not talking about, I don't think, authors who were suspected of being f

The thing about it is, also in reply to of George Eliot below by steerpike, is that, I'm not talking about, I don't think, authors who were suspected of being female. But, as with the case of Shakespeare and Shelley, the taking of authorship from one extant given individual to another who happens to be more conveniently attributed (i.e., those who are attributed with writing Shakespeare's plays are always upper-class British.) It is interesting to note about Tiptree is that, after the revelation, is to look at the timeline of reviewer and commentator documentation from the time and how there was this whole chunk of the community that overnight did a 180 from thinking a male Tiptree was a decent to good writer to 'we / I always knew she wasn't that much'. Similar statements can be made for C.L. Moore, and others. (However, I don't mean to claim that the entirety, or even a substantial part of the SF community feels such, but I do find it interesting that the percentage of the community which does hold such seems to align, roughly, with the percentage of the relevant populations involved with the question of the authenticity of authorship of people such as Shakespeare and Shelley.) edit: The thing I think I'm trying to get at is that there seems to have been a shift, that is, Shakespeare and Shelley are so fundamental to a certain class of western identity, that it almost seems as the transfer of their authorship is to 'polish them up', because, while a few---if you were to just interview people off the street at random---know Austen and the Brontes, fewer Eliot, but who in the English-speaking world doesn't know some version of Frankenstein or that Shakespeare is supposed to be some big deal? (And even with Twilight, and what people seem to know of Heathcliff and Cathy, it's modernly, as with Jane Eyre, cast in the modern romantic (eros) mode, thereby deracinating them of their inherent social commentary.)