Jodi Picoult’s new book about the “Q”

A guest post from the award-winning novelist and how she found the authorship question • Part 1

You may have noticed in our October News Roundup—or any mainstream media book review section—that Jodi Picoult, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of twenty-nine novels, has recently published a novel on the Authorship Question titled By Any Other Name. It is already a #1 bestseller. The work is presented as intertwining narratives, one set in 1581 about Emilia Bassano who pays a man to use his name, thereby writing her own out of history, and the other in the present—a female descendant of Bassano’s who is also a playwright finding it difficult to get credit for her own work.

To find out more about Picoult, visit her website. Her work has been translated into thirty-four languages and her landmark novel 19 Minutes was recently deemed the most banned book in the United States in a recent report conducted by PEN America.

Teaser: Two women, centuries apart—one of whom is the real author of Shakespeare's plays—are forced to hide behind another name to make their voices heard.

We are delighted that Picoult has shared how she became interested in Shakespeare, the authorship question, and Emilia Bassano with readers of this substack.

By Jodi Picoult

When I was in college, I fell in love with Shakespeare. I loved the plays for their beautiful language and for their protofeminist characters—Beatrice, Rosalind, Portia, Lady Macbeth. At the end of one semester, our professor casually mentioned that maybe Shakespeare did not write his own plays. Like all the other English majors, I scoffed at that idea. But then years later, I read an article in The Atlantic by Elizabeth Winkler: “Was Shakespeare A Woman?” In it she mentioned Shakespeare had two daughters who survived infancy, and he taught neither of them to read or write. They signed with a mark.

I didn’t buy it. How could a man who created such three-dimensional female characters not teach his own girls to read or write?   

Winkler, whose book on the subject, Shakespeare was a Woman and Other Heresies, I cannot recommend highly enough.