Jodi Picoult’s New Historical Fiction Takes on Sexism Through the Ages: ‘Little Has Changed in 400 Years’ (Exclusive)

Mar. 15, 2025

Tim Llewellyn; Penguin Random House

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Penguin Random House

For Picoult, all a reader has to do is look at Shakespeare’s strong, independent female characters to start to question whether he could (or would) have written them alone, as a self-educated man working simultaneously as a writer, actor and producer at a time when women weren’t even allowed to publish under their own names.

“[He wrote] these women who were so strong and so different from the women historically back then,” she explains. When she readan article inThe Atlanticabout Shakespeare’s authorship that revealed he never taught his two daughters to read, it set off alarm bells in Picoult’s brain.

“I call bulls—,” she exclaims. “I do not believe that the man who created those same characters would not have taught his own daughters how to read or write.”

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“I wanted to talk about how little has changed in 400 years,” she says. “We are literally at a crossroads in this country right now where women are having rights taken away from them. And where women’s voices, again, don’t matter. I would argue, I’ve maybe written the most present, real story I’ve ever written. This is happening in real time. This is not historic.”

Jodi Picoult in February 2024.Tim Llewellyn

Tim Llewellyn

“I’ve gotten into a lot of hot water talking about gender discrimination in publishing and in the arts, and in many ways it all just sort of arrowed down into this particular book and this particular story,” she explains. “You [have to] make the table bigger. You make sure that there are stories for Black creators and queer creators, and brown creators and female creators, and all of those things, and that is not happening yet.”

source: people.com