By Any Other Name

By Any Other Name braids together two women, four centuries apart, who share a common struggle: to have their words heard in a world that refuses to credit them.

In Elizabethan London, Emilia Bassano — a real historical figure, poet, and one of the first Englishwomen to publish a book of poetry — is brilliant, ambitious, and utterly barred from the stage by her sex; Jodi Picoult imagines her as the true author behind plays the world would come to attribute to William Shakespeare. In the present day, Melina Green, a young playwright, watches her own work be dismissed and overlooked, until she submits it under a man's name.

Moving between Emilia's dangerous, vivid Tudor world and Melina's contemporary one, this richly researched novel is a story about authorship, erasure, and the long history of women written out of their own achievements.