I tried with my last novel, Trixie, to change my pen name from “Victoria N. Alexander” to the less formal “Tori Alexander.” I had hoped to stop the confusion between me and “Victoria Alexander,” a romance novelist. It didn’t work. My non-fiction book, The Biologist’s Mistress: Rethinking Self-Organization in Art, Literature and Nature, was mistaken for Victoria Alexander’s The Perfect Mistress. My publisher called me “Trixie Alexander” a couple of times.

Trixie will republished under the name “Victoria N. Alexander” when copies bearing the failed pen name sell out. The torialexander.com website has migrated to victorianalexander.com.

O that I had chosen “V. N. Alexander” as my pen name I would have been confused with the Vladimir Nabokov Archives or V. S. Naipaul or A. S. Byatt or assumed to be male or ….