By Any Other Name
By Any Other Name
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Jodi Picoult on By Any Other Name
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
The daughters Shakespeare never taught to readPicoult had encountered the Shakespeare authorship debate before and dismissed it. What cracked that indifference open was a single biographical detail she read in a 2019 Atlantic article by Elizabeth Winkler: that Shakespeare had two daughters who survived infancy and that he arranged for neither of them to be literate.
I don’t believe that the same person who created those incredibly complex female characters in the plays would not have taught his own daughters to read or write. It made me fall into, as I said, this rabbit hole about authorship.
The rabbit hole led her to Emilia Bassano, a name she had never encountered in years of Princeton coursework on Shakespeare. The more she researched, the more the convergence between Emilia’s documented biography and the gaps in Shakespeare’s record felt like something beyond a writing project.
I feel like I was put on earth to write that book, and to get readers to learn about Emilia Bassano. I think the reason the story resonated so much with me is because I know very well how female writers are judged differently than male writers.
Before she wrote a word of the novel, she had already lived a version of its central event. When she co-wrote the libretto for the stage musical of her novel Between the Lines, a producer told her that crediting the source novelist as co-librettist would look like a vanity project to investors. She agreed to omit her name. The show opened at Second Stage Theater in 2021 listed without her as a writer of the production. Her co-librettist, Timothy Allen McDonald, later had the credit restored through his lawyers.
I was willing to give up my name just so I could see that show make it. And I have to say that I so value my co-writer for saying, ‘This isn’t right, and she deserves the credit too.’
That experience made the book’s subject something she was living in real time, not studying from a distance. In a December 2024 video interview, she described three months on book tour sitting next to men in suits on planes, announcing she was a novelist, and being asked repeatedly whether she wrote children’s books, romance, or women’s fiction.
I write a lot about controversial topics. But I am rarely living those controversial topics. This I live every single day. [paraphrased from audio]
How she wrote it
Two halves written separately, then mashed togetherHistorical fiction was new territory for Picoult, and the density of Elizabethan detail made her usual dual-timeline method unworkable. She had spent years writing novels that moved freely between time periods, but Emilia Bassano’s world required too much simultaneous tracking.
I should probably not admit this, but this is the first book I wrote in two halves — Emilia’s first, then Melina’s — and then mashed them together. I had so much trouble keeping all the details of Emilia’s life and world in my head, I just couldn’t zip back and forth between the two time periods.
Almost everything documented about Emilia Bassano’s life comes from the diary of Simon Forman, a quack astrologer-doctor she consulted about recurrent miscarriages, now held at the Ashmolean Museum. Picoult supplemented this with digitized court records of Queen Elizabeth’s daily schedule and the Agas Map, a navigable historical map of Elizabethan London that novelist Deb Harkness introduced her to. The world she built from those sources was meant to meet a high factual standard.
When I write about a joust, for example, that Queen Elizabeth has at court, that really happened. Everything in there is absolutely historically accurate.
That standard sent her down unexpected research paths. She found herself checking Elizabethan royal feast menus, whether common people had glass window panes, and the specifics of sewage systems. Building Emilia’s London felt less like writing a novel set in the past and more like constructing an alternate world that had to hold together under scrutiny.
It felt like writing fantasy. I was creating a world, but had to make it something rich and nuanced and also historically accurate.
The modern sections, by contrast, required no research at all. Melina Green, the book’s contemporary playwright, faces a string of dismissals from the theater industry about her work. Every one of them was something Picoult had heard in person about her own shows. She was told one production was too emotional, too small, too focused on a girl’s coming of age. The irony was precise: at the time she received those notes, two male coming-of-age musicals were running on Broadway simultaneously.
Everything that Melina Green hears in the book fictionally about her work is something I was told to my face about a show that I wrote. That it’s too emotional, it’s too small, it’s about a young girl’s coming of age — nobody wants to see that. I was told that at a time when there were two male coming-of-age musicals on Broadway at the same time.
The synthesis between Emilia’s researched life and Melina’s lived experience is the structural engine of the novel: one timeline authenticated by archives, the other by the author’s own career.
The personal thread
The splinter she had already learned to live withPicoult spent years co-writing musicals inside an industry where the terms under which women’s work appears are decided by others. She had accepted the erasure of her libretto credit as the price of getting a show made. The co-writer who pushed back made her confront what she had been willing to absorb.
I feel like this is the book I was meant to write. I have spent so many years talking about gender discrimination in publishing — and being cut down by men for doing so — but Emilia’s story is the ur-version of what we female writers are still experiencing today.
The book’s central question, whether credit matters as much as the work itself, stayed open for Picoult as she wrote it. Her co-writer’s insistence on restoring her name gave her an answer she had not had before: the arrangement she had accepted would always have felt like something lodged and unresolved.
I guess maybe I’ve learned, you know, kind of what Emilia does, which is, you can’t really ever separate the art from the artist.
The urgency behind the novel also came from a broader moment she was watching closely. Her usual practice is to write toward the question that will not leave her alone at night, and the year she began this book, that question had a specific political and social shape.
I always write about the things that are keeping me up at night, and I don’t think it’s any great secret that it’s quite hard to be a woman in America at this moment.
What she wants us to sit with
Not history if it is still happeningThe novel’s two timelines, set four centuries apart, were built to make one argument unavoidable: that the distance between Emilia Bassano’s Elizabethan England and Melina Green’s contemporary theater world is smaller than readers expect. Picoult described the purpose of the modern storyline in those exact terms.
Four hundred years ago, women were not credited for their minds, and 400 years later, nowadays, we are still not being given credit for our minds.
She is careful about one misreading the book invites. Given that her argument rests on Emilia Bassano as a plausible author of the plays, readers might assume her target is Shakespeare’s legacy. She rejects that framing precisely because she loves the plays and wants readers to engage with them, not set them aside.
I never set about to write this story because I wanted to take down Shakespeare. I did it because I love those plays, and I wanted to understand how they could have come to be.
The actual outcome among readers surprised her. She had expected resistance from scholars and Shakespeare enthusiasts. She got that, but it was not what dominated her reader mail. What she did not anticipate was how many people wrote to say the novel had sent them back to plays they had never understood.
I have heard from far more people who’ve said to me, ‘I never really got into Shakespeare. I didn’t understand it, but man, now after this, I’m reading it again, and it suddenly makes sense.’
That response is the one that maps most directly onto what she set out to do: not to settle the authorship question but to make the plays matter again, this time as the record of a woman who had no other way to speak.