By Any Other Name – A Novel

🌹 Book Review: By Any Other Name by Jodi Picoult
Dual timelines, buried authorship, and a woman’s fight to be heard across centuries.

What if the world’s most famous playwright didn’t write his own words?

Jodi Picoult’s By Any Other Name is a richly layered novel that unravels the mystery of authorship, gender, and artistic integrity—blending present-day dilemmas with Elizabethan secrets. Through parallel stories, we meet Melina Green, a modern playwright battling industry bias, and Emilia Bassano, a woman of the 1500s who may have been the true voice behind Shakespeare’s works.

What struck me most is how boldly the novel confronts the centuries-long silencing of women in literature. Back then, Emilia wasn’t even allowed to publish under her own name. Her words had to hide behind a man’s. And still today, Mel feels the echo of that erasure—especially when her own play gains recognition only because it’s mistaken for a man’s work.

But Mel’s story isn’t one of simple triumph. Her decisions are messy, human. When her friend submits her script under a pseudonym (Mel), and it’s chosen, she doesn’t correct the mistake. Instead, she lets the lie breathe, thinking maybe it had to be a man’s words that were worthy. And in doing so, she unintentionally drags her best friend into a web of deceit, blinded by the hunger to finally be seen.

That tension—between survival and integrity, between voicelessness and ambition—mirrors Emilia’s own impossible choices. Both women live in a world where the rules were not made for them, and both must decide how far they’ll go to reclaim their voice.

The back-and-forth timeline works beautifully, allowing us to fully step into each woman’s world. The theatre, whether in the 1500s or 2024, becomes a stage for injustice and courage alike. It’s not just a novel about Shakespeare—it’s a reckoning with who gets to be remembered, and who gets to be erased.

⭐ Rating: 4.8 / 5 — Poetic, probing, and deeply relevant. A haunting meditation on truth and authorship.

📖 You can find the book here on Amazon.
✨ Not a paid review. Just a quiet recommendation from one reader to another.