Philippa Gregory, reigning queen of Tudor romance, has a new ambition

Publish date: 2024-08-09

Cracking open a Philippa Gregory novel is like yanking down the blinds and saying you’ll close your eyes for 15 minutes — 30 tops — then waking up in the dark, heavy-limbed. You think you’re stealing an indulgence; it swallows your day whole. What century is it again? The story unfolds in a first person so close you can feel the character’s breath being constricted by her gown. The narrator calls herself “a woman grown”; she’s probably in her teens. She believes all eyes are on her, that every movement of her heart is freighted with political and cosmic weight; she’s actually right about that. She is, or will be, or serves, a queen. Some beady-eyed adviser is going to warn her about the imprudence of defying His Majesty. Something horrible is about to happen to her. A rival — someone younger, prettier, sillier — listens at the door. An army masses at the gates. Fever has found her infant in the cradle.

You know Gregory, probably, from “The Other Boleyn Girl” — and if not, then from another slice of the approximately 6,400 pages of fiction she’s written, across two decades and 15 novels, about the Tudors and Plantagenets. (She has also published more than a dozen books set in other eras, including a satire of 1990s feminism, “Perfectly Correct.”)

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Her new book, “Normal Women,” is nothing like these stories of desire, cruelty, bloodshed, feminine competition. It’s a hefty work of nonfiction, spanning nine centuries of British history. It aims to tell the story of women in England from 1066 to the present day — nothing more, nothing less. Told in a distant third person, the chapters are broken up into smaller subsections with headings like “Single Women,” “Women Loving Women” and “Preachers.”

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It all started when she published “The Other Boleyn Girl” and readers kept asking how she’d “found” the character of Mary Boleyn, Gregory said in a recent video interview.

People assumed that “all of these women were ‘hidden from history,’ in the great phrase by Sheila Rowbotham,” she said. “And that in order to find them, you had to make this mighty effort and excavate them one at a time.” As she embarked on the new project, Gregory realized, “blessedly,” that the process wasn’t really about finding women. “The fact is, they are all there in the record, doing quite extraordinary things and quite ordinary things.”

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Gregory is massively successful by practically any measure: In 2017, when she published what was then described as her final Tudor court novel, Simon & Schuster estimated that more than 10 million copies of her books were in circulation in North America alone. “The Other Boleyn Girl” was made into a movie twice — the BBC and Hollywood each took a crack at it — and has been trailed by a retinue of high-gloss TV shows. She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2021.

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Novelist Sarah Waters places Gregory in a cohort of authors committed to “prising open or overturning some of history’s ‘grand narratives,’” she wrote in an email. Waters describes Gregory’s Wideacre trilogy as “unlike any kind of historical novels I’d come across before. They were unafraid to be sexy and shocking, unafraid to be full of visceral narrative pleasure.”

But Gregory also has notably passionate detractors. In certain corners of online Tudor fandom, her name is shorthand for gratuitously inaccurate, racy froth. Susan Bordo, in her 2013 cultural study of Anne Boleyn, dismissed Gregory’s claims of conducting deep research to inform her fiction as “self-deceptive and self-promoting chutzpah.” Bordo even went on to describe how the members of one history group on Facebook sarcastically referred to Gregory as “our favorite historical novelist” and had “fantasy-conversations involving sending snipers to her public talks.”

Most authors wouldn’t go that far. “She’s certainly controversial,” said Susan Higginbotham, who has written several novels set in the same era, later adding, “I don’t agree with a lot of her characterizations, but I do think she has an arguable historical basis for them.”

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“She paints with a very vivid brush. She’s really not held back by the history,” historical novelist Clare McHugh said. “She wants to bust it open and make it, you know — Technicolor. It’s salacious. I think that bothers people.” McHugh added that the mind-sets of Gregory’s characters strike her as too modern and that “occasionally she has people meeting who might have never met. But not a lot! She tries really hard to stick to what is known about people’s movements.”

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So why does Gregory trigger such a strong response? McHugh was one of several writers whose explanations included some variation on, “I would say people who disparage her are envious of her sales.” Gregory might be polarizing not because her novels are outrageously wide of the mark but because of how widely they’ve circulated. She controls the factory settings of how the public imagines these figures.

“It can get really weird in history land,” observed Higginbotham, who recalled getting threats on Facebook after she said “something rude about Richard III” in an early book. “I’ve written about the Wars of the Roses and about the Civil War — the American Civil War, that is — and I’d say I’ve met more people who are really unhinged about the Wars of the Roses.”

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Readers become personally invested in particular historical figures from this period. “I don’t thoroughly and completely understand it,” Tudor historian Tracy Borman said. “They stir great passions. They stir disagreements. I’ve gotten hate mail about people I’ve written about.” (In her case, she admitted, it was also Richard III.)

“I’ve made enemies for life because people have said that I’ve been unfair to Anne Boleyn and to Margaret Beaufort,” Gregory said. “And I go, yeah, I may have a different view of them than you, but I do not try and oppress you with my opinion. If you don’t like my novel, you can write your own.”

Historian Dan Jones has his own theory about why Tudor novelists take so much heat: Hilary Mantel. Her trilogy about Thomas Cromwell — and her insistence on hewing to recorded fact — gave the genre a halo of prestige. Per Jones: “Categorically, ‘Wolf Hall’ ruined everyone’s fun. ”

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“The Tudor scholarship industry bought into it as well, because ‘Wolf Hall’ was so good for business, sort of forgetting that history and historical fiction are different things,” Jones, also a novelist, added. “Everyone else, doing perfectly fine historical fiction — that lives in the world, sticks broadly to the facts, remembering you have a license to create, invent and distort up to a point — everyone else has suffered because Hilary was so po-faced and precious about historical ‘integrity.’”

Gregory appears largely unruffled by the criticism. (And her tribute after Mantel’s death noted that “over the years we have both steadfastly refused to rise to bait of rivalry.”) Asked whether she thought people treated her work unfairly, she answered with careful mildness: No, it isn’t unfair. It’s fair to critique anyone who publishes anything.

She allowed: “It’s a bit irritating if there isn’t the history available at the time, and I am going off what is available, for then people to do later research and go, ‘Well, she got that wrong.’ I don’t have a crystal ball.” While writing “The Other Boleyn Girl,” for example, she had to make her best guess at the sisters’ birth order; documents later emerged suggesting that Mary, not Anne, was the elder.

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Over time, Gregory’s reputation has transformed, Borman said. If you view historical fiction on a spectrum between the strenuously accurate and the highly fanciful, Gregory “used to be associated much more with the fanciful, and she was criticized a lot by historians for not being upfront about where she had veered from the facts and for making things up and misleading history. I don’t know if she has consciously made a change or there is a greater respect for the art form of historical fiction, but I sense that people are taking her a bit more seriously now, as a historian and a historical novelist.”

Jones, who has known Gregory for years, said: “This move to do history has been very, very, very important to her, because of everything we’ve been talking about. She is a brilliant historical novelist, and she does her research. I think she just wants to — my sense from her is — she can do this stuff. She can do nonfiction.”

All those royal Marys and Elizabeths and variously spelled Katherines we love, and love to hate, occupy just a handful of pages in “Normal Women.” They share space with medieval women — named and unnamed — who worked alongside men in virtually every profession; Alice Davy, a wet nurse in Henry VII’s household; Helen Duncan, the last witch to be sentenced under English law, in 1944.

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“This is a passion project in every sense of the word. It’s taken me 10 years. It’s not paid —” Gregory paused. “It’s not paid for itself. Not at all.”

She thought an intuitive starting place was the Norman invasion, which abolished the landowning system that included women. The challenge then became deciding when to end, “because every time I open a newspaper now, I see a new instance of the feudal laws still working.” (Gregory settled on 1994, when English women were ordained into the Anglican Communion.) She always wanted the book to be big: “I didn’t want to do ‘Ten Badass Women.’ … I always wanted to build a national history to sit alongside, for instance, Winston Churchill’s ‘History of the English-Speaking Peoples.’”

She aspires for “Normal Women” to be the kind of book that would have changed her life if she’d read it as university student. How so? “I would have got on with history a lot quicker. I would have realized its importance a lot quicker. I think any woman reading history has a sense of absence from the pages.”

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I asked Gregory what she’s working on next, whether she’s looking forward to returning … “‘to your proper work?’” she finished the thought, archly. When we spoke, Gregory was posted up in an Airbnb in Liverpool, where the Shakespeare North Playhouse is producing her first play, “Richard, My Richard.” She’s writing a children’s adaptation of “Normal Women” — “There are savage cuts” — and thinking about a television documentary version; plus, another one of her books might get turned into a series.

After all that, though, yes: “I’m going to go back to novel writing,” Gregory said. “Probably a Tudor novel.”

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