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The weblog has caught the imagination of thousands of people around the world, attracting a similar audience to Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City.

Belle is not the first anonymous sex columnist. Last year a teenager from Sicily became a sensation with a novel about her sexual adventures. It was pitched as a thinly veiled autobiography. The author, Melissa Panarello, initially tried to remain anonymous but the book’s success forced her to reveal her identity. It has sold 500,000 copies and is being translated into English.

IN HER OWN WORDS

samedi 25 octobre

I spent all morning getting ready to meet the manager. This involves no small amount of eyelash curling, hair straightening and wardrobe panicking. Sexy, but not slutty? You’ll be wanting the dark silk top, then. Young, but serious? Well-cut coat. As much cleavage as I could muster. Boots, of course — it is autumn in London after all. My nails are an acrylic nightmare but there was simply no time. On the way to the meeting point, I passed a poster for Intolerable Cruelty and managed to convince myself that I looked not unlike Catherine Zeta-Jones. Right.

mercredi 12 novembre

Yes, I really am a call girl. A bored journaliste could probably fake this blog but I’m not that clever. I wouldn’t say no to a “real” writing career but lack the necessary perseverance. I play safe. Nothing is foolproof, but I’m cleaner and more careful than most “normal” girls. Thank you for the concern, though . . . My experience in the business has been more good than bad. I don’t think it’s for everyone but then again neither is engineering.

lundi 15 décembre

As most transactions in my business are paid in cash I find myself at the bank rather often. I tend to use the same one at a similar time every day. Cashiers are naturally curious people who would have to be brain-dead not to wonder why I come in with rolls of bills several times a week and deposit into two accounts, one of which is not mine.

lundi 12 janvier

I had a date the other night — no, really. A real date with someone who uses my real name and rings me on my real number. Okay, he may have been a hologram, but I promise you the rest of it was real. Did I get a bit nervous when faced with having to leave a message on his answerphone? Check. Did I deliberate over what I was going to wear on our date for two days beforehand? Check.

The clues left by her compound verbs

IT TOOK Don Foster, the English professor who unmasked Joe Klein as the author of Primary Colors, just 20 minutes to discover what Britain’s literary establishment had missed (Sam Coates writes).

The academic, from Vassar College in New York, identified Sarah Champion using little more than common sense, the internet and the vagaries of the English language. An initial reading of Belle’s text gave him several clues. “I immediately thought that Belle was English rather than American, internet-savvy and probably lived outside London,” he said.

He deduced this because UK spellings prevailed in her work, that there were referen-ces to numerous websites in the text and that at one point she refers to “South London speech”.

Two oddities immediately caught his attention — her use of “cringe-worthy” rather than “cringeworthy” and “suffice to say” rather than “suffice it to say”. He punched the two terms together into Google, the internet search engine, and this returned 187 hits. He narrowed this down further by combining this search with some of Belle’s more unusual compound verbs.

“Compound verbs are often unique to an author, and were a crucial fact in identifying the author of Primary Colors,” he explained. Putting her compound verbs into Google yielded 87 results, a small enough sample to start going through individually. He was struck by a reader’s book review of Tony Hawks’s Round Ireland with a Fridge on Amazon.com by Sarah Champion, noticing a number of similarities. This led him to search for other examples of Ms Champion’s work to perform a more detailed comparison. A web log written by her in Thailand in 2000 again bore striking similarities.

He assembled as much material on her as he could, from a number of book reviews and websites. From this, he revealed that both Belle and Ms Champion:

• Have a tendency to switch between single quotes for single words and double quotes for conversation;
• Frequently use brackets where not strictly necessary;
• Use space, hyphen, space, where other writers might use a longer dash without spaces;
• Use an organisation’s name as a collective noun taking a plural verb, as in “Time Out have done impressive job”;
• Use italics in an unconventional and similar manner.

  He then searched for “internal biographical evidence” for comparison, such as literary or geographical references.

  “From these pieces of evidence, I reckoned we had a pretty good match,” Professor Foster said yesterday.

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