Changing her maiden name could be the most traumatic thing a newlywed has to face. Annabel Heseltine investigates what's in a name

On my wedding day I was advised to hang onto my maiden name. As a writer and broadcaster this made sense professionally, but when I announced that I didn't want to change it at all, I found myself at the centre of a heated debate.

'When you marry you become a couple, and sharing a name is a public statement of togetherness,' cried shocked parents, aunts and their friends. Even more conventional members of my own peer group grew angry. 'What does it matter what name you go under? Whatever you do is still done by you.'

But, selfish as it sounds, a name is more than a title. I've worked with this one far too long to relinquish it now. It's a home that I have lived in all my life and feel attached to. 'There is a magical quality in names - to change the name is to change the character,' wrote Graham Green in Ways of Escape. I am too old to change.

In a traditional Church ceremony, a woman is given away by one man and passed to another like a slave. Her name, along with all her worldly goods, becomes her husband's. It is old-fashioned, not to say farcical, that women who work, who have their own incomes, bank balances and lives, should be stripped of their identity by a wedding vow. For women who marry later in life and have already established themselves under a name, changing it can seem faintly ridiculous, not to say professionally batty.

It never occurred to the labour peer Baroness Ann Mallalieu, QC, to change her name when she married. 'Maybe it was because I was a little older, thirty-three,' she says. 'I grew up with this name and it feels odd to change identity overnight. I find it insulting when I am introduced by my husband's name. If you suggested to a man that he change his name he would be staggered. Some women who have changed their names have been resentful - two of my friends changed their names back when their children left home.'

Not everyone feels the same. Posh Spice became Victoria Beckham when she married. 'It's a small gesture and just one of those things that you do when you get married,' said a 28-year-old gallery owner. 'My husband is a hard-working, conscientious person and I would be snubbing him because I was hung-up on what I had before. He would be very hurt if I refused to call myself by his name.'

Part of the problem is men who feel challenged when their wife rejects their name. At lunch the other day I sat between a couple who married in their thirties. When the wife revealed that her career wasn't the only reason she retained her surname, her husband became confused. 'No,' she said. 'There is something else. It is who I am.'

Many women opt for an after-six-o'clock compromise. Fashion designer Selina Blow married to GP Charles Levinson, uses her maiden name at work but becomes Mrs Levinson in the evening. 'I don't need a name to prove myself. I didn't change on my wedding day and I don't need to walk down a street burning my bra to prove I am a strong character. Besides, I am very proud of my husband's name.' In the evening Lisa Webster is Mrs Wade but it took the 31-year-old corporate lawyer a year to change her passport. 'It was the last thing I had to do and it was sad, in a way, saying goodbye to being single. It made me feel older, like I'm on my way to my 40s.'

Of course, no woman is going to vanish into a void of wifeliness, where everything done before marriage is forgotten, obliterated by a signature. But in a time of transition, people can be slightly sensitive. Personally, I look forward to the day when everybody is addressed individually and invitations are issued to a couple with both their names at the top. It's a woman's assertion of her individuality.

Did you change your name? What's in a name? Tell us what you think.