Chapter summaries By Any Other Name Jodi Picoult

Chapter 9: Emilia — Summary and Analysis

[Spoiler Warning: This page assumes you have read Chapter 9 of By Any Other Name. If you haven’t, proceed with caution.]

Summary

The chapter spans Emilia Bassano’s life from age 19 to 23, years of profound creative and emotional awakening. Living as Lord Hunsdon’s mistress, she secretly writes poetry and hides hundreds of pages under her mattress. At Mary Sidney Herbert’s literary salon, Emilia witnesses a female patron who translates plays, writes with disappearing ink, and encourages Emilia’s mind. A chance encounter with the now-teenaged Earl of Southampton rekindles a spark that becomes a secret, passionate affair. Simultaneously, Emilia befriends playwright Christopher “Kit” Marlowe, who treats her as an intellectual equal. Reading his work and discussing Dido’s fate forces her to question how literature punishes independent women. By the chapter’s end, Kit has proposed that Emilia write a play—one based on the real-life murderess Alice Arden—and she begins to imagine a story where a woman’s violent bid for freedom might be seen as courage, not sin.

Key Events

  • Emilia accompanies Hunsdon to Wilton House, where Mary Sidney Herbert hosts a salon including Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, and Michael Drayton. Mary stages a closet drama of her translated Antoine, which feels like a secret message to Emilia about passing on a creative dream.
  • Mary Sidney demonstrates her “disappearing ink”—an alchemical mixture that vanishes after writing—and Emilia recognizes the symbolism of women’s invisible labor.
  • During a court feast, Emilia feigns illness to avoid eating, revealing she is secretly fasting for the High Holy Days and practicing her hidden Jewish faith in isolation.
  • In the park, she re-encounters Henry Wriothesley, the young Earl of Southampton, now around sixteen. Their flirtation escalates into a kiss he initiates and she reciprocates.
  • At a reading of Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage, Emilia meets the playwright and critiques the play’s double punishment of its heroine. Marlowe calls her “someone with much to say… when few are listening.”
  • Emilia and Southampton begin a clandestine physical affair, meeting at Paris Garden. She discovers her own desire and power in the relationship, distinct from the transactional nature of her connection to Hunsdon.
  • Marlowe finds Emilia writing her Venus and Adonis poem, reads it aloud, and encourages her talent. Their friendship deepens rapidly as they share literary ambitions and personal histories.
  • Disguised as a mute young man named Emile Hammersmith, Emilia accompanies Kit to meet John Heminges and Will Shakespeare, who is trying to get his plays commissioned.
  • After a near-discovery in the orangery—where Southampton witnesses Emilia perform oral sex on Hunsdon to protect their secret—she finishes her poem and dedicates it to Southampton.
  • Kit, outraged that a pamphlet condemning playwrights dismisses uneducated actors, convinces Emilia to write a play herself. They choose the story of Alice Arden, a wife who murdered her husband, as subject matter, and Emilia begins to conceive a narrative that questions the tragedy of women seeking freedom.

Character Development

Emilia: Moves from silent observer to active creator. Her secret writing becomes a lifeline, and her intellectual confidence grows through her friendship with Marlowe. She experiences sexual desire for the first time with Southampton, yet she remains clear-eyed about the impossibility of a future with him. By chapter's end, she accepts that her identity will always be split—visible mistress, invisible poet, hidden Jew—and that the page is her only place of full honesty.

Lord Hunsdon: His physical decline is more noticeable; he relies on Emilia as a companion and confidante. His genuine pride in her poetry shows affection beyond possession, but his role remains that of a patron who cannot truly see her as an independent artist.

Henry Wriothesley (Southampton): The boy behind the curtain has become a young peer intoxicated by first love. His naïveté is stark against Emilia’s pragmatism; he believes obstacles can be overcome, while she knows their relationship is inherently tragic.

Kit Marlowe: A subversive, witty foil who treats Emilia as a literary peer. He becomes the catalyst for her transition from private poet to aspiring playwright. His own outsider status—a scholarship boy, rumored atheist and spy, lover of men—mirrors her marginalization in a different key.

Mary Sidney Herbert: A fleeting but pivotal mentor figure who demonstrates that a woman can write, translate, and claim intellectual territory, even if only within private walls and invisible ink.

Themes, Symbols, or Motifs

Invisible Ink and Women’s Erased Labor: Mary Sidney’s disappearing ink literalizes how women’s intellectual work is systematically rendered invisible. Emilia’s own hidden pages are a physical manifestation of the same phenomenon.

Fasting and Hidden Faith: Emilia’s secret observance of the High Holy Days underscores her lifelong practice of exterior conformity and interior defiance. Hunger—for food and for freedom—becomes a motif that recurs in her artistic drive and her sexual awakening.

The Falcon’s Jesses: In a dream, Emilia sees Hunsdon’s falcon fly free when its leather jesses unravel, a transparent symbol of her own longing to slip the constraints of her station. The falcon is trained to return to the glove; Emilia dreams of what happens when it does not.

Opposing Narratives of Love: The chapter contrasts transactional, protective love (Hunsdon) with passionate, dangerous desire (Southampton) and intellectual companionship (Marlowe). Each reveals a different facet of what Emilia lacks and craves.

Art as Re-visioning: Marlowe’s Dido punishes its heroine for independence; Emilia’s Venus and Adonis inverts the power dynamic, making Venus the pursuer. The Alice Arden project goes further, re-examining a “monstrous” woman and asking whether her act might be understood rather than condemned.

Why This Chapter Matters

Chapter 9 is the hinge on which Emilia’s story swings from passive endurance to active artistic rebellion. Her meeting with Kit Marlowe—and his insistence that she write a play—gives her a permission she never had: to turn her furious, hungry interior life into public-facing art, even if someone else’s name will be on the title page. The chapter also introduces the central thematic tension that will likely drive the rest of the novel: the name on the manuscript versus the voice that truly speaks it. Emilia’s double life now has a triple layer—mistress, secret Jew, and now ghostwriter—each demanding its own silent performance. The brief, almost farcical appearance of Will Shakespeare, a minor writer desperate for a commission, plants a seed whose payoff is yet to come.

Study Questions and Answers

1. How does Mary Sidney Herbert’s “disappearing ink” function as more than a literal alchemical substance in this chapter?

The ink is a metaphor for the systemic erasure of women’s creative and intellectual work. Mary writes a bold signature that vanishes, just as her translations and dramas must be performed privately and attributed if they enter the public sphere at all. Emilia’s hidden poetry and her eventual anonymous playwriting operate on the same principle: the work exists, even if the name behind it cannot. The ink also suggests that invisibility can offer a kind of protection—if no one can prove you wrote it, you cannot be fully condemned.

2. Why is Marlowe’s choice of the Alice Arden story significant for Emilia’s first play?

The Arden story allows Emilia to explore a woman who refuses to be a tragic victim. Instead of writing a cautionary tale about female sin, she begins to imagine Alice’s actions through a lens of courage and desperation. Marriage, in Emilia’s framing, is a system that strips women of autonomy; widowhood restores it. Murder is not excused, but the play asks audiences to consider the violence inherent in the social order that led to it. This inversion mirrors what she has already done with Venus and Adonis—reversing who pursues, who has power.

3. In what ways does Emilia’s relationship with Southampton differ from her relationship with Hunsdon?

With Hunsdon, intimacy is a contract: security for compliance, tinged with genuine affection but not passion. With Southampton, Emilia experiences desire she actively chooses, not an arrangement she accepts. However, the relationship also reveals the limits of that freedom: Southampton is young, privileged, and incapable of understanding the risk he poses to her. When she performs for Hunsdon in the orangery while Southampton watches, she forces the younger man to see the real cost of her life—and perhaps to see her not as a romantic ideal but as a woman who must survive within brutal constraints.

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