Elizabeth Winkler is a journalist and book critic whose work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Economist, among other publications. She received her undergraduate degree from Princeton University and her master’s in English literature from Stanford University. Her essay “Was Shakespeare a Woman?”, first published in The Atlantic, was selected for The Best American Essays 2020. She lives in Washington, DC.
“An extraordinarily brilliant and scholarly work, written with an
unyielding sleuthing instinct and sparkling with pleasurably
naughty moments. This page-turner is mesmerizing.”
—André Aciman, PhD, New York Times bestselling author of Call
Me by Your Name
“A fascinating detective story… whose irreverence is part of its
appeal.”
—The Guardian
“Elizabeth Winkler is blessed with the clear-eyed wit of a heroine
in a Shakespearean comedy. Her undoing of the fools in the forest
of the authorship question is iconoclasm As You Like It—joy to
behold, lesson for us all.”
—Lewis Lapham, founder of Lapham’s Quarterly
“As a literary-investigative reporter, Elizabeth Winkler… pursues
her quarry with tenacity and grips it like a dog with a bone.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Lively…. Winkler is a crackerjack researcher, deftly laying out
the myriad questions, arguments and mysteries swirling around
Shakespeare.”
—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
“Elizabeth Winkler’s Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other
Heresies is one of the most engaging, riveting, scholarly, and
challenging whodunits anyone with an interest in theater, human
psychology, literature, and history can hope to
read. Following in the footsteps of Henry James, Mark Twain,
Mark Rylance, and innumerable other skeptics, Winkler writes about
what has been essentially a centuries old theological dispute
about the origins of Shakespeare’s astounding body of work like a
Shakespearean drama itself: full of complex characters with false
reputations and deceptive appearances.”
—Bessel van der Kolk, MD, New York Times bestselling author of
The Body Keeps Score
“No, Elizabeth Winkler doesn’t reveal the true identity of the
writer Ruth Bader Ginsburg termed “the literary genius known by the
name William Shakespeare.” But she does explain how we’ve wound up
with, among an army of others, a republican Shakespeare and a
monarchist Shakespeare, a Shakespeare who hated his wife and one
who loved his, a Shakespeare who wrote all the plays and a
Shakespeare who could not write at all. Along her intrepid way,
Winkler charts, with refreshing clarity, the much-contested ground
underfoot, studded with flinty convictions, gnarled fictions, and a
surprising number of land mines.”
—Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The
Revolutionary
“Fascinating and often delightful…. Shakespeare Was a
Woman may represent something of an “emperor’s-no-clothes”
moment for academia.”
—Winnipeg Free Press
“A perfect introduction to a world of unbridled passion,
retribution, and intrigue—I refer of course to the Shakespeare
authorship question. Brilliant and mind-blowing.”
—Karen Joy Fowler, New York Times bestselling author of
Booth
“A fascinating read. Winkler boldly pushes against
traditional boundaries of gender and identity to show that meaning
can be constructed in many different ways.”
—Amanda Foreman, PhD, internationally bestselling author of
Georgiana
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