Born: Unknown, United Kingdom (assumed)
Died: Unknown
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: Unknown
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
We cannot know for certain who the anonymous author of Blue-stocking Hall (1827) and Tales of my time (1829) truly was, but we can be quite sure it was not William Pitt Scargill. For more than 150 years, they have been misattributed to him even though reviews and advertisements of the time clearly indicate that it was common knowledge that the unknown novelist was female. The publisher’s archives indicate they were written by a “Mrs. Wilmot,” possibly Alicia Wilmot, though this could have been a pseudonym. Wilmot’s sister-in-law Anna Maria Chetwood has also been suggested as a candidate. The only basis for the misattribution was an 1832 review of an actual Scargill novel that speculated he might have written the other two—even that reviewer acknowledged his guess “may be wrong” as the only indication was “the internal evidence of a family resemblance.” On that flimsiest of bases, many sources, even reputable reference materials, continue to attribute a woman’s work to a man who never claimed it.