The Alphabet Challenge: G is for Gregory

It was the lunch hour of the autumn term of 1989, and I was at school, sitting in the middle of a little knot of my closest friends in the cobbled courtyard where we liked to spend our free time. Since vanished in the course of redevelopment, the little courtyard had a vending machine dispensing cups of hot chocolate for 10 pence each.  We sat in a row on the wide Victorian doorstep, drinking the scalding, watery brew from cream-coloured plastic cups and chatting.  Reading, with us, never excluded an individual from the conversation and at any time, at least one of our number would be buried in the latest gold-embossed blockbuster, which would eventually be passed round the rest of us.  On this occasion, the reader was regaling us with a snippet from the sex scene she had just reached.  We’d grown up on episodes of Dallas and Dynasty, so we weren’t easily shocked, but the plotline of this book – sibling incest, and not the soap opera version where it only happens because the participants don’t know they are related –  took even us aback.  The title? Wideacre by Philippa Gregory.

Beatrice Lacey, as strong-minded as she is beautiful, refuses to conform to the social customs of her time. Destined to lose her family name and beloved Wideacre estate once she is wed, Beatrice will use any means necessary to protect her ancestral heritage. Seduction, betrayal, even murder — Beatrice’s passion is without apology or conscience.

With jacket copy like that, why haven’t I ever read it? Well, partly I was put off by the sibling incest theme. And maybe I just got distracted by all the other gold-embossed blockbusters. But really, I think it’s because I only got round to buying it years later, and my copy looks like this:

It’s just so green and brown and bland, that so far I can’t be bothered. If I had a copy with a girl with a 1980s perm brandishing her riding whip, I’m sure I’d have got to it by this time. I don’t want to spoil myself flicking through it for the bit my friend read out all those years ago, but I have no doubt that I’ll know it when I read it.

My next encounter with Philippa Gregory – and the first book of hers I actually read – was The Other Boleyn Girl, which, according to my reading journal (which I kept for nearly three years before starting this blog), I read in December 2007.  And I loved it.

Loved everything about it? No. Gregory’s Anne Boleyn wasn’t my Anne Boleyn.  While I agreed that she was driven by ambition, I didn’t see her as quite this cold and calculating.  I thought she was a better mother.  I didn’t believe the accusations of incest.  And I thought that if she had been called upon to act as regent for her unborn child, far from collapsing in consternation, she’d have managed just fine.  But none of that really mattered.  I was entertained and enthralled by the book.

It wasn’t, as with so many other readers, my introduction to historical fiction – I’d read so much historical fiction growing up – all the classics, Gone with the Wind and Forever Amber and the Angelique books and Juliette Benzoni and Georgette Heyer and Jean Plaidy and her alter ego, Victoria Holt, whose The Queen’s Confession is the book which launched my love of historical fiction (and, by inspiring my interest in French history, helped determine my career path).  During my teen years historical fiction was still popular and I went on reading authors like Fanny Deschamps (The King’s Garden), Françoise Chandernagor (The King’s Way) and Susan Kay (Legacy).  But in the 1990s, historical fiction fell from favour.  It was still being published, but not in the same volume, and it wasn’t nearly as visible to the average bookbuyer.  As a result, I stopped reading new historical fiction: I re-read older books rather than buying new ones.  I had an idea that the newer stuff was different somehow and I wouldn’t like it.

The Other Boleyn Girl changed all that. It was the same old thing – after reading my way through Jean Plaidy and studying the Tudors three times at school and twice at university, I knew the story well, including exactly who Mary Boleyn was – and yet it seemed fresh, new and exciting.  Historical fiction went back on my reading list – both brand new books and first-time authors and all the books I’d missed during the past fifteen years.  So although my experience with Philippa Gregory’s other books has been mixed, I will always be grateful to her for reviving my love of my favourite genre.

This cover was, and continues to be, hugely influential – and yet it would never have inspired me to pick up the book by itself.  The colours are so drab.  My favourite Gregory cover so far has been this one:Unfortunately I didn’t like the book anything like as much as the cover, and in fact I didn’t finish it.  I enjoyed what I read of the machinations surrounding Mary and Elizabeth, but I felt the way the central character, Hannah, kept shuttling between the two was contrived and made her seem disloyal.  Also the romantic plot seemed predictable (although, to be fair, I didn’t finish the book, so perhaps it wasn’t).

I had better luck with The Boleyn Inheritance:

I found this technically the best of those Gregory books I’ve read and this is the one I usually recommend. I’m not normally a fan of first-person present-tense but in this case I felt it worked very well – 90% of the time. I was intrigued by Jane Boleyn’s narrative. I liked the portrayal of Catherine Howard – not that I felt it was a particularly novel take on her, but it was very well done. And I got so caught up in Anne of Cleves’s story that at one point I was holding my breath, waiting for her to be arrested for witchcraft. Carla Nayland has an excellent review of The Boleyn Inheritance here.

With this, unfortunately, it was back to liking the cover more than the book. I didn’t feel the tripartite narrative structure, which was split between Bess of Hardwick, her husband and their prisoner, Mary, Queen of Scots, worked nearly as well as it had in The Boleyn Inheritance.  The book seemed repetitive and I was frustrated by not having access to Queen Elizabeth’s point of view. The story focuses on the Northern Rebellion of 1569 (well-remembered from my schooldays) which has the merit of being a fresher approach than the standard cradle-to-grave MQS novel, but ultimately felt rather arbitrary, as it wasn’t the most dramatic time in Mary’s life.

And finally, Gregory’s most recent offering, The White Queen:

Image from www.twilightsucks.com

Yes, I know I just used this for my Twilight post, but it’s just as appropriate for the early part of The White Queen, when Elizabeth Woodville is constantly being abandoned by Edward IV, who has to go off and fight the Wars of the Roses. Personally, I only got as far as the Battle of Barnet before abandoning the book. Two reasons: the constant references to Elizabeth’s witchy ancestress, Melusine, started to be a bit much – and the point of view kept veering away from Elizabeth, who was supposed to be the narrator, to cover events she could have no knowledge of (except through her witchy powers I suppose, but this wasn’t made explicit. There was no framing device such as her looking in a crystal ball or something). The most insightful review I have come across is at the Book Blog of Evil.

To sum up, Philippa Gregory is an unpredictable author for me – I never know whether I’ll like her books or not, which won’t stop me checking out her future titles. She is one of the most successful and best-known authors of historical fiction writing today – and high profiles attract criticism.  There is a lengthy Wikipedia page discussing liberties she may or may not have taken with historical fact in just one novel, The Other Boleyn Girl. Arleigh (historical-fiction.com), in a recent author highlight post on Gregory, has this to say:

I found it a bit annoying that during the promotion of The White Queen and directly after it there were a number of readers and reviewers picking it apart as if it were meant to be a biography. Certain liberties are allowed when one is imagining a fictional account of a story. I can be somewhat of a historical accuracy fanatic myself, but there is a difference between writers who have not done proper research and those who tend to stretch the facts to suit their story. I believe Philippa Gregory knows enough of the history to spin a greatly imagined scenario within the confines of her character’s known lives.

My view? While unnecessary inaccuracies annoy me, I don’t mind at all if a novelist goes with their own interpretation of history rather than sticking with whatever the currently received wisdom is. And like Arleigh, I enjoy reading different takes on historical characters. Novelists are free to use imagination, intuition and speculation in addition to traditional research. Historians are not.

The problem? Philippa Gregory describes herself as an historian. “Although some people think I am a romantic novelist I have always thought of myself as a rather gritty radical historian,” she has told Barnes & Noble. Her website and her publisher’s website state that:

Philippa Gregory was an established historian and writer when she discovered her interest in the Tudor period and wrote the novel The Other Boleyn Girl which was made into a tv drama, and a major film.

To my knowledge – and someone please correct me if I’m wrong – Philippa Gregory has only ever published fiction. She has a PhD, but in the eighteenth-century novel (ie, in the field of literature rather than history).

I don’t mean to imply that this makes her unfit to write history. Many novelists have also produced academic work – Anita Brookner is an art historian, Francoise Chandernagor has contributed papers to academic conferences on the subject of Madame de Maintenon (the central character in her bestselling novel The King’s Way), and Alison Weir writes both history and fiction. But Gregory has only written fiction.

Whatever the depth of research that goes into a novel – and few novelists have the time and resources to do the archival research required of historians, which may require specialist language or palaeographical skills as well as extended periods of travel – it can’t be held to the same standards as a work of non-fiction. By claiming to be an historian, Philippa Gregory invites higher levels of criticism – and thus fuels the controversy surrounding her books.

If you like Philippa Gregory…

For many readers, Philippa Gregory is their introduction to historical fiction, and the final part of this post is aimed at anyone who is a fan of her work and is now looking for similar authors.  I consulted with Sarah Johnson (Reading the Past), herself author of Historical Fiction: A Guide to the Genre (2005) and Historical Fiction II: A Guide to the Genre (2009). Sarah recommends Vanora Bennett, Susan Holloway Scott, Robin Maxwell and Karleen Koen. I would add to that: Elizabeth Chadwick and Alison Weir. Happy reading!

UPDATE: 22 APRIL 2010: Simon & Schuster UK have acquired a non-fiction book co-authored by Philippa Gregory. From The Bookseller:

Simon & Schuster has bought a non-fiction book co-authored by Philippa Gregory about the three women at the heart of her Cousins’ War series, which began with 2009′s The White Queen.

Publishing director Suzanne Baboneau bought world rights to The Women of the Cousins’ War by Philippa Gregory, David Baldwin and Michael Jones directly from the authors for an undisclosed sum.

Gregory will write the introduction and examine the historical background of Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford, while Baldwin and Jones will write about Lady Margaret Beaufort and Elizabeth Woodville respectively.

The book will be published in October 2011.

Tags: philippa gregory, the boleyn inheritance, the other boleyn girl, the other queen, the queen's fool, the white queen, wideacre