By Any Other Name
by Jodi Picoult
GENRE: Historical Fiction
Young playwright Melina Green has just written a new work inspired by the life of her Elizabethan ancestor Emilia Bassano. But seeing it performed is unlikely, in a theater world where the playing field isn’t level for women. As Melina wonders if she dares risk failure again, her best friend takes the decision out of her hands and submits the play to a festival under a male pseudonym.
In 1581, young Emilia Bassano is a ward of English aristocrats. Her lessons on languages, history, and writing have endowed her with a sharp wit and a gift for storytelling, but like most women of her day, she is allowed no voice of her own. Forced to become a mistress to the Lord Chamberlain, who oversees all theatre productions in England, Emilia sees firsthand how the words of playwrights can move an audience. She begins to form a plan to secretly bring a play of her own to the stage—by paying an actor named William Shakespeare to front her work.
Told in intertwining timelines, By Any Other Name, a sweeping tale of ambition, courage, and desire centers two women who are determined to create something beautiful despite the prejudices they face. Should a writer do whatever it takes to see her story live on . . . no matter the cost? This remarkable novel, rooted in primary historical sources, ensures the name Emilia Bassano will no longer be forgotten.
Jodi Picoult is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of twenty-nine novels, including most recently the #1 bestseller By Any Other Name. Her landmark novel 19 Minutes was recently deemed the most banned book in the Unites States in a recent report conducted by PEN America.
Picoult’s books have been translated into thirty-four languages. Her two YA novels Between the Lines and Off the Page, co-written with her daughter Samantha Van Leer, have been adapted by the authors into a musical entitled Between The Lines. She is also the co-librettist of the musical, Breathe, and a musical adaptation of The Book Thief, based on the international bestselling novel by Markus Zusak, which premiered in the UK in September 2022. Her co-adaptation of the musical Austenland is currently in development.
Picoult is the recipient of many awards, including the New England Bookseller Award for Fiction, the Alex Awards from the YALSA, a lifetime achievement award for mainstream fiction from the Romance Writers of America, the NH Literary Award for Outstanding Literary Merit and esteemed Sarah Josepha Hale Award. She was the recipient of the 2024 Free Speech Defender Robie Harris Author Award from the National Coalition Against Censorship. She holds honorary doctor of letters degrees from Dartmouth College and the University of New Haven. She is a patron of the Carole Shields Prize for Fiction which is awarded to female fiction writers. She is a member of the Board of Trustees for PEN America.
Picoult lives in New Hampshire with her husband. They have three children and two grandchildren. - Author's website
Publisher's Weekly
Picoult (Wish You Were Here) offers a stimulating if muddled parallel narrative of two women writers, each of whose work is credited to a man. In 1582, poet Emilia Bassano becomes consort to Lord Hunsdon, Queen Elizabeth’s Lord Chamberlain. At the time, women were forbidden to have anything to do with the theater, but when Emilia crosses paths with William Shakespeare, he’s impressed with her work and agrees to pay for the sonnets and plays she’s secretly written if he can take credit for them. Thus begins a working relationship that spans decades. In the present day, Emilia’s descendant Melina Green writes a play about Emilia and Shakespeare, but fears she won’t be able to get it produced after being told that people only relate to plays by men. Unbeknownst to Melina, her roommate, Andre, submits the play to a fringe festival under the pseudonym Mel Green, leading the artistic director to assume the writer is a man. After the play is accepted, Andre poses as Mel during the production, with Melina pretending to be his assistant. The Elizabethan sections, which follow Emilia through an unhappy marriage as the work she wrote for Shakespeare receives acclaim, are the strongest. In comparison, Picoult’s depictions of racism and sexism in the contemporary theater world are a bit simplistic. It’s a mixed bag. (Aug.)
Kirkus
Who was Shakespeare?
Move over, Earl of Oxford and Francis Bacon: There’s another contender for the true author of plays attributed to the bard of Stratford—Emilia Bassano, a clever, outspoken, educated woman who takes center stage in Picoult’s spirited novel. Of Italian heritage, from a family of court musicians, Emilia was a hidden Jew and the courtesan of a much older nobleman who vetted plays to be performed for Queen Elizabeth. She was well traveled—unlike Shakespeare, she visited Italy and Denmark, where, Picoult imagines, she may have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—and was familiar with court intrigue and English law. “Every gap in Shakespeare’s life or knowledge that has had to be explained away by scholars, she somehow fills,” Picoult writes. Encouraged by her lover, Emilia wrote plays and poetry, but 16th-century England was not ready for a female writer. Picoult interweaves Emilia’s story with that of her descendant Melina Green, an aspiring playwright, who encounters the same sexist barriers to making herself heard that Emilia faced. In alternating chapters, Picoult follows Melina’s frustrated efforts to get a play produced—a play about Emilia, who Melina is certain sold her work to Shakespeare. Melina’s play, By Any Other Name, “wasn’t meant to be a fiction; it was meant to be the resurrection of an erasure.” Picoult creates a richly detailed portrait of daily life in Elizabethan England, from sumptuous castles to seedy hovels. Melina’s story is less vivid: Where Emilia found support from the witty Christopher Marlowe, Melina has a fashion-loving gay roommate; where Emilia faces the ravages of repeated outbreaks of plague, for Melina, Covid-19 occurs largely offstage; where Emilia has a passionate affair with the adoring Earl of Southampton, Melina’s lover is an awkward New York Times theater critic. It’s Emilia’s story, and Picoult lovingly brings her to life.
A vibrant tale of a remarkable woman. (Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2024)
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist
Perennial best-seller Picoult, who has tackled such heady subjects as same-sex marriage, abortion, and racism, takes on another hot-button topic sure to ignite controversy and conversation: the question of Shakespearean authorship. In this dual time line tale, struggling playwright Melina Green has written a play about her ancestor Emilia Bassano, who she believes really penned many of Shakespeare’s greatest plays. Frustrated with sexism in the New York theater scene in 2023, Melina pushes her Black male friend Andre, also a playwright, to claim credit for her work when a lauded but arrogant critic expresses interest in getting the play produced. This leads to a Shakespearean—or should it be Bassanian?—comedy of errors. At the same time, Picoult tells Emilia’s story. Forced to become a courtesan at 13, she eventually falls in love with a handsome nobleman, but when she gets pregnant, she’s married off to a brutal man and forced to earn a living penning poems and plays for a dissolute actor, namely, William Shakespeare. Some readers will undoubtedly quibble with Picoult’s conclusions about the Bard, but they’ll just as assuredly find themselves thoroughly engaged with the struggles of Emilia, Melina, and Andre as writers with the deck stacked against them in this timely and affecting tale. -- Kristine Huntley (June 1, 2024)
The Personal Librarian
by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray
In her twenties, Belle da Costa Greene is hired by J. P. Morgan to curate a collection of rare manuscripts, books, and artwork for his newly built Pierpont Morgan Library. Belle becomes a fixture in New York City society and one of the most powerful people in the art and book world, known for her impeccable taste and shrewd negotiating for critical works as she helps create a world-class collection.
But Belle has a secret, one she must protect at all costs. She was born not Belle da Costa Greene but Belle Marion Greener. She is the daughter of Richard Greener, the first Black graduate of Harvard and a well-known advocate for equality. Belle’s complexion isn’t dark because of her alleged Portuguese heritage that lets her pass as white—her complexion is dark because she is African American.
The Personal Librarian tells the story of an extraordinary woman, famous for her intellect, style, and wit, and shares the lengths she must go to—for the protection of her family and her legacy—to preserve her carefully crafted white identity in the racist world in which she lives.
The Engineer's Wife
by Tracey Enerson Wood
She built the Brooklyn Bridge, so why don't you know her name?
Emily refuses to live conventionally—she knows who she is and what she wants, and she's determined to make change. But then her husband asks the unthinkable: give up her dreams to make his possible.
Emily's fight for women's suffrage is put on hold, and her life transformed when her husband Washington Roebling, the Chief Engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge, is injured on the job. Untrained for the task, but under his guidance, she assumes his role, despite stern resistance and overwhelming obstacles. But as the project takes shape under Emily's direction, she wonders whose legacy she is building—hers, or her husband's. As the monument rises, Emily's marriage, principles, and identity threaten to collapse. When the bridge finally stands finished, will she recognize the woman who built it?
Based on the true story of an American icon, The Engineer's Wife delivers an emotional portrait of a woman transformed by a project of unfathomable scale, which takes her into the bowels of the East River, suffragette riots, the halls of Manhattan's elite, and the heady, freewheeling temptations of P.T. Barnum. The biography of a husband and wife determined to build something that lasts—even at the risk of losing each other.
The Weight of Ink
by Rachel Kadish
Set in London of the 1660s and of the early twenty-first century, The Weight of Ink is the interwoven tale of two women of remarkable intellect: Ester Velasquez, an emigrant from Amsterdam who is permitted to scribe for a blind rabbi, just before the plague hits the city; and Helen Watt, an ailing historian with a love of Jewish history.
When Helen is summoned by a former student to view a cache of newly discovered seventeenth-century Jewish documents, she enlists the help of Aaron Levy, an American graduate student as impatient as he is charming, and embarks on one last project: to determine the identity of the documents’ scribe, the elusive “Aleph”.
Electrifying and ambitious, The Weight of Ink is about women separated by centuries–and the choices and sacrifices they must make in order to reconcile the life of the heart and mind.
