30th August 2017
Originally published in the Northern Echo, Weekend Edition, 12 August 2017. By Hannah Stephenson.
Bestselling novelist Philippa Gregory has made a habit of focusing on strong women in history. Take The Other Boleyn Girl, her bestselling story about Anne Boleyn’s sister, which was adapted for the big screen and starred Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman, or The King’s Curse, which introduced us to Catherine of Aragon’s lady-in-waiting, Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury.
She has sold more than ten million books around the world, revealing the untold stories of women in history, largely focusing on the Tudors and Plantagenets. “Almost universally I focus on women in my books,” says Gregory, who lives in North Yorkshire. “Women’s stories are less well known. Some I've written about are almost completely unknown and don’t have any published biography. Those are stories waiting to be told, and the research is really interesting. Bringing their stories to life is important, because it enhances our view of women’s capacities and women’s histories.”
Writing about strong women in history has come to the attention of two-times Man Booker prize-winning novelist Dame Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, who recently told a London audience that women writers must stop rewriting history to make their female characters falsely “empowered”. Earlier in the year, Dame Hilary also told an Oxford literary conference that she disapproves of historical novelists who flirt with real historian status, attacking writers who “try to burnish their credentials by affixing a bibliography”, as Gregory is known to do. But Gregory doesn’t want to feud with Dame Hilary. “Hilary and I have never met. We just haven’t been to the same events at the same times. We’ve corresponded a couple of times by email, particularly when everybody said she was being critical of me. She very pleasantly emailed me and said, ‘I wasn’t talking about you,’ and I replied and said, ‘I’m absolutely sure you weren’t’. She’s clearly keen not to go further on this and says of Dame Hilary: “I read Wolf Hall when it first came out and absolutely loved it. I think Hilary’s a great writer of historical fiction.”
Gregory’s latest novel, The Last Tudor, centres on the Grey Sisters – Lady Jane Grey, who reigned for just nine days, her sisters Katherine and Mary, and their cousin Queen Elizabeth’s brutal treatment of them, to ensure they would not produce any potential royal heirs. “I give a very critical description of Elizabeth as a monster. It’s written in the voices of the three Grey girls and it’s very important to me that we see it from their point of view. Elizabeth is completely paranoid about her heirs, who are younger and prettier than her, and who are able to marry for love in a way that she never allowed herself. It’s a negative, nightmarish picture of Elizabeth.”
She has already had interest from film production companies about possible screen adaptations, but is treading carefully. Many of her works, including The Other Bolyen Girl and her Cousins’ War series (which the BBC’s The White Queen was based on), have been turned into screen productions. She says: “I’ve been very lucky in the attention that’s ben paid to my novels. Each adaption is different and brings a different writer and a different aesthetic. I much prefer it if they stay close to the history, which is truly what happened.”
Usually, she sells the rights and then acts as a consultant, although she has been executive producer on occasions. She had no involvement in the making of The White Princess – the story of Elizabeth of York and her marriage to Henry VII – which was shown in the US, and clearly wasn’t too impressed with the final outcome. “The scriptwriter says she wanted to make Game of Thrones with women. I didn’t and I don’t. And I didn’t know that at the beginning,” she says. Now, she has a new contract with TV production companies specifying that they may not alter the history. “To produce a historical drama which is unhistorical is not what it says on the tin. To me, it’s a bit of a waste of time.”
An adaptation of Gregory’s first historical novel, Wideacre, which this year celebrates its 30th anniversary is currently in production in the UK. She has been on set during other productions, saying: “Sometimes it’s completely wonderful. Often you get attached to the actors and these set-based friendships, because often the actors are asking me a lot of detail about the backstory of the characters. Rebecca Ferguson and I have a genuine friendship after she was Elizabeth Woodville in The White Queen.”
She says she intends to continue writing about women in history whose stories have not been greatly explored. “It’s not that I keep falling over exceptional women, it’s that most of the women were exceptional. Normal women lived their lives struggling for power, struggling for survival, and in the course of that, they experience heroic endeavour. It just so happens that their stories aren’t very much recorded or selected by historians.”
The 63-year-old feminist author lives on a 100-acre farm on the North York Moors near Stokesley with her third husband, Anthony Mason (she has a son, a daughter and four stepchildren), and is currently working on a novel set in the 1640s about a fictional character living in West Sussex, and a non-fiction book about a general history of women, which she says will take her years.
She notes that women still have some way to go to achieve equality. “I would have expected us to have got further on by now,” she says.
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The Last Tudor is available now.