New £10 note - Jane Austen 'authoress'

[JeanSeberg]

I was surprised to hear Victoria Cleland, Director for Banknotes and Chief Cashier of the Bank of England, refer to Jane Austen as an 'authoress' on BBC news this morning.

Would author not have sufficed?

Is authoress a word?
I've never heard it before, and it seems counter to the way general usage is going i.e. actress is used less and less, in favour of actor.

Whilst I think that it's not necessary to point out the sex of a person by using gendered versions of the occupation, it does disturb me that it always seems to be the male one that's chosen.

So I'm in two minds about which I prefer - using the gendered name, or using the wrong gendered name that we're told we should think of as for either sex now.

I don't agree that author is masculine - surely it's a gender-neutral action word. Author - one who writes, actor - one who acts.

It's very old fashioned. When I was a child I used to go around saying I wanted to be an authoress, it would never occur to me to use that word now.

The OED would seem to agree that it is a generic noun (last sentence) - although the fact that the generic noun only has female endings, but not male ones does rather play into male as default I feel.

English is regarded as possessing natural gender in that certain pronouns expressing natural contrasts in gender are selected to refer to nouns according to the meaning of the nouns, the contrasts being either between masculine (e.g. he, his, etc.) and feminine (e.g. she, her, etc.) or between personal (e.g. the abovementioned masculine and feminine pronouns and who, whoever, etc.) and non-personal (e.g. it, its, which, etc.). In recent times nouns incorporating gender suffixes (esp. those indicating females and formed on generic nouns, such as authoress, poetess, etc.) have become much restricted in use.

I didn't hear the programme, but if I'd been the interviewer I'd have been obliged to refer to Ms Cleland as Directoress for Banknotes after that and got myself sacked !

Maybe she used 'authoress' unconsciously because that's how Austen would have been referred to in her day.

On the other hand, ugh.

Ha ha Optimist1, like it!