Many years after Melina graduated from Bard College, the course she remembered the most was not a playwriting seminar or a theater intensive but an anthropology class. One day, the professor had flashed a slide of a bone with twenty-nine tiny incisions on one long side. "The Lebombo bone was found in a cave in Swaziland in the 1970s and is about forty-three thousand years old," she had said. "It's made of a baboon fibula. For years, it's been the first calendar attributed to man. But I ask you: what man uses a twenty-nine-day calendar? The professor seemed to stare directly at Melina. "History," she said, "is written by those in power."
By Any Other Name ~ by Jodi Picoult, 2024, biographical fiction, 525 pages
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 theater productions in England, Emilia sees firsthand how the words of play-wrights 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 Willam Shakespeare to front her work.
Told in intertwining timelines, this novel is a tale of ambition, courage, and desire, centered on 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?
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