Jodi Picoult’s New Historical Fiction Takes on Sexism Through the Ages: ‘Little Has Changed in 400 Years’ (Exclusive)

In 'By Any Other Name,' the bestselling author drew from her own experiences as a woman in theater

Bestselling author Jodi Picoult, 58, has tackled a lot of big topics over her three-decade career. In her 29 books to date, she's taken on racism, the death penalty, abortion, school shootings and now she's turning her pen to another big question: what if Shakespeare's plays were really written by someone else — and what if that someone was a woman?

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Her latest novel By Any Other Name, out Aug. 20, tells the dual-timeline stories of Emilia Bassano, a real contemporary of the Bard's who some historians believe could have authored Shakespeare’s work, and Melina Green, a fictional modern-day playwright who finds success by using her Black male roommate’s name.

For Picoult, all a reader has to do is look at Shakespeare's strong, independent female characters to start to question whether he could (or would) have written them alone, as a self-educated man working simultaneously as a writer, actor and producer at a time when women weren't even allowed to publish under their own names.

"[He wrote] these women who were so strong and so different from the women historically back then," she explains. When she read an article in The Atlantic about Shakespeare's authorship that revealed he never taught his two daughters to read, it set off alarm bells in Picoult's brain.

"I call bulls---," she exclaims. "I do not believe that the man who created those same characters would not have taught his own daughters how to read or write."

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Beyond the female authorship question, Picoult was driven to include the modern-day element by some of her own experiences adapting Between the Lines, the book she wrote with her daughter Samantha van Leer,for the stage — not to mention living as a woman in today's world, period.

“I wanted to talk about how little has changed in 400 years,” she says. "We are literally at a crossroads in this country right now where women are having rights taken away from them. And where women's voices, again, don't matter. I would argue, I've maybe written the most present, real story I've ever written. This is happening in real time. This is not historic."

The author added that everything that's said to Melina, the fictional female playwright, has been said "to my face" and that she doesn't understand why stories about women written by women aren't more prevalent. "But that also opens up the whole question of what is diversity in creativity when it comes to theater, which is something Emilia [Bassano] had to deal with as well."

Her drive to point out the disparity is another reason By Any Other Name is so meaningful to her.

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"I've gotten into a lot of hot water talking about gender discrimination in publishing and in the arts, and in many ways it all just sort of arrowed down into this particular book and this particular story," she explains. "You [have to] make the table bigger. You make sure that there are stories for Black creators and queer creators, and brown creators and female creators, and all of those things, and that is not happening yet."

By Any Other Name comes out Aug. 20 from Ballantine Books and is now available to preorder, wherever books are sold.

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