Do you recall “Primary Colors,” a “novel of politics” published in January 1996 and ascribed to Anonymous? The book was, in effect but not in name, a lurid depiction of the domestic lives of Bill and Hillary Clinton during the campaign for the presidency in 1992, and the identity of Anonymous became a hot issue for several months. The likeliest candidate, Joe Klein, denied to Dan Rather on CBS that he was the author. On July 17, he was outed by a handwriting analyst. That same day, he confessed the truth and expected that his colleagues in the press would be amused. They were not. They resented the subterfuge as a breach of journalistic faith: Newsweek suspended his column, the New York Times denounced his “actions and words” as “corrupt and corrupting,” and he was forced to resign from CBS News. Ridiculous punishment, you may say. Mr. Klein was merely selling a book and making a little local mischief. He was also mocking a culture of celebrity in which author and book are nearly indistinguishable.

But Mr. Klein was not alone, original, or unique. John Mullan’s book, “Anonymity” (Princeton University Press, 374 pages, $22.95), is a survey of anonymous publication in English literature in the last four or so centuries. He hasn’t done an exact count, but he believes that “a good proportion of what is now English Literature consists of works first published, like [Alexander Pope’s] The Rape of the Lock, without their authors’ names.” He also maintains that most — though not all — anonymous writers want to be found out. But not immediately. They first want the excitement of gossip and speculation: Who wrote the book? A man or a woman? A woman, it is often suggested, if it contains passages of delicate feeling, sympathy, and pathos. A man, if it is robust and worldly.

The motives that Mr. Mullan finds for anonymity are a diverse bunch: mischief, the publicity instinct, the desire to test the limits of discretion, gamesmanship, “creative defiance,” a sense of social advantage, and of precaution — in Britain, in the first years of the 18th century, the need to evade the inconvenience of censorship, arrest, and imprisonment. When this last fear receded, the most respectable reason for anonymous publication became a desire to retain one’s privacy even while offering one’s wares to the public. Charles Dodgson, whom we love as “Lewis Carroll,” told his publisher: “I cannot of course help there being many people who know the connection between my real name and my ‘alias,’ but the fewer there are who are able to connect my face with the name ‘Lewis Carroll’ the happier for me.” (This from a man who was fascinated by photography and regularly took pictures of charming little girls.) Mary Anne Evans, now better known as “George Eliot,” wrote to the proprietor of Blackwood’s Magazine: “Whatever may be the success of my stories, I shall be resolute in preserving my incognito, having observed that a nom de plume secures all the advantages without the disagreeables of reputation.”

In his account, Mr. Mullan includes pseudonymity as a well-established form of anonymity: Sylvia Plath writing as “Victoria Lucas,” Cecily Fairfield as “Rebecca West,” Eric Blair as “George Orwell,” Anthony Burgess as “Joseph Kell,” Julian Barnes as “Dan Kavanagh,” Harry Patterson as “Jack Higgins,” Ruth Rendell as “Barbara Vine,” and — I might add — John Banville as “Benjamin Black.” Some of these pseudonyms have been fully disclosed: The authors made no effort to keep them secret. When you pick up a novel by Benjamin Black in an airport bookstore, you are told directly that it is “really” by that well-established Irish novelist Banville, except that, on this occasion, he has let his hair down and relaxed into a lighter genre, the crime story, rather than practice his art in the more demanding form of a novel. Graham Greene did much the same thing by writing “entertainments” in addition to his more serious “novels,” but he kept the same name throughout.

Doris Lessing’s history with pseudonymity is more peculiar. She wrote a novel called “The Diary of a Good Neighbour” and had her agent submit it to her usual publishers, Jonathan Cape and Granada, under the name “Jane Somers.” The publishers turned it down, but it was accepted by a third, Michael Joseph, and published in 1983. The following year, still as “Jane Somers,” she wrote a sequel: “If the Old Could…” Gradually, news of her authorship began to circulate, and in 1984 both books were re-published as “The Diaries of Jane Somers,” with a preface in which Ms. Lessing described the books’ first publication. Anyone could have told her that a novel by the unknown Jane Somers would not sell as well as one by the famous Doris Lessing. A typescript by Ms. Somers would not even be read as seriously as one by Ms. Lessing. Sad, but there it is. It was an escapade with little point, though it probably did wound Ms. Lessing’s pride.

The merit of Mr. Mullan’s book is that it delivers an account of the bizarre collection of motives that drives a writer to publish, but also to hide from the publication. The desire for publicity and the equal-and-opposite desire for privacy make for bold tension, indeed. If I want to retain my privacy and keep my face to myself, the easiest method is not to publish at all. On the other hand, I may want to be taken up by Oprah. Most writers balance these motives as best they can; they may even gratify themselves that a balance has been achieved. But anonymity enables a writer to enjoy the sensation of being public only to himself, and to indulge the squeamishness he may feel about coming forward at all. It is crucial, he may be convinced, to keep his distance from his own writing and the public persona created by it. If I am “George Orwell” at large, I am Eric Blair to myself and my intimates. Best of both worlds.

But there is also the immense question of lying. And Mr. Mullan doesn’t take this matter as seriously as it deserves. Joe Klein may or may not be a liar but, on that occasion in 1996, he did lie, and kept on lying. On February 12, 1859, George Henry Lewes, Mary Anne Evans’s quasi-marital partner, wrote to John Chapman, her employer and probably her one-time lover: “Mrs Lewes…authorizes me to state, as distinctly as language can do so, that she is not the author of ‘Adam Bede.'” A lie, sir, a flagrant lie! I was instructed by the Christian Brothers’ penny catechism that “no lie can be lawful or innocent, and no motive however good can excuse a lie, because a lie is always sinful and bad in itself.” I still believe that to be true. I would have liked an extra chapter in John Mullan’s book on the lies told so blatantly by Victorian moralists in the cause of anonymity: Did they really not think of such lies as lies, but as permissible equivocations, mere subterfuges? But even as Mr. Mullan’s book stands, it is fresh and continuously engaging.

Mr. Donoghue’s most recent book is “On Eloquence.”