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Dr Brooke Magnanti has set a fine example for digital-age writers

By putting her own name to the Belle de Jour blog, the sex blogger has joined one of literature's more honourable traditions
Mon 16 Nov 2009 07.57 EST

The story of Belle de Jour, the anonymous sex blogger whose elusive mystery has tantalised investigative journalists, literary detectives, and blog-busters for years is headline news, of course. Sex sells. And the woman who was not Isabel Wolff, or Rowan Pelling, or Toby Young, or some grand literati on a pornographic spree, but actually a medical researcher named Dr Brooke Magnanti, was not only an artful and seductive writer, but also a clever manipulator of a voyeuristic audience for whom the idea of prostitute as Everywoman is a powerful fantasy.

In the shadows of anonymity, Dr Magnanti certainly had a career that many more recognised writers might have envied: huge sales, bestseller status and television spin-offs. Take away the contemporary spin, and not much here is new. Literary history, especially in the 18th century, is littered with writers who chose to write anonymously. At the low end they are all forgotten; at the high end they range from Jonathan Swift and Walter Scott to Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë. As so often in the past, something, in the end, persuaded Dr Magnanti to come clean.

The newspaper reports of her self-revelation suggest that she decided to break cover to forestall an ex-boyfriend kissing and telling, but I think her disclosure is both simpler, and more complicated, than that, and it has to do with the nature of authorship.

There are many reasons to write. Freud famously boiled it down to "money, fame and the love of women". Beyond that, of course, there is the urge to express a burning idea, opinion or sentiment – "having something to say", as the expression goes. Such a motivation has animated countless blogs, books and newspaper articles. In the end, most such literary endeavours can be filed under "self-expression".

And that's the clue to Dr Magnanti's move: she wanted to take ownership of her "self". Belatedly, but nonetheless frankly, she did what all writers must do when they publish: admit to authorship. The origins of "author" are telling: the word derives from the Latin auctor, meaning promoter, agent or originator. In other words, by breaking cover, Magnanti decided to seek some kind of originality and hence establish a measure of personal authenticity. As she wrote in her blog yesterday, "The non Belle part of my life isn't the only 'real' bit, it's all real. Belle and the person who wrote her have been apart too long. I had to bring them back together."

What, I wonder, does this say about blogging? For many writers, exploring the genre for the first time, it's the anonymity of the blogosphere that's both thrilling and unnerving. Free content and anonymous self-expression is liberating but intrinsically irresponsible. Writers who grew up in the more constrained world of print can find the adaptation difficult, even antipathetic to the nature of their art.

I imagine that Dr Magnanti who, at 34, is a child of the internet in its early years, had that experience. First there was exhilaration, eventually there was an awareness of responsibility, as much to herself as to her audience. Finally, she was proud of what she had expressed in Diary of a London Call Girl, and wanted to expose it to the rough-and-ready give and take of the literary marketplace. Implicitly, she seems to be conceding that there is something shameful, even dishonest, about opinions that are expressed from behind a mask.

This may be a bourgeois view, but to me the ownership of the written word is fundamental to the western literary tradition. So I welcome Dr Magnanti's decision to come clean as striking a blow for the very best traditions of self-expression.