Philippa Gregory
About Author
Philippa Gregory studied at Sussex university, and is a PhD and Alumna of the Year 2009 of Edinburgh university.
She 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. After six novels about the Tudors, she is now writing about the family that preceded the Tudors, the Plantaganets.
She lives with her family on a small farm in Yorkshire where she keeps horses, hens and ducks.
Her other great interest is the charity that she founded nearly twenty years ago: Gardens for The Gambia. She has raised funds and paid for 140 wells in the primary schools of this very dry and poor African country, and thousands of school children have been able to learn market gardening in the school gardens watered by the wells.
She also reviews for the Washington Post, the LA Times, and for UK newspapers, and is a regular broadcaster on television, radio, and webcasts from this website, Philippa Gregory.com.
Interview
June 2012
CHANGELING (Order of Darkness series)
Published by Simon & Schuster
The year is 1453 and strange happenings around Europe are seen as signs that the world is ending... Luca Vera is appointed by the Church to record the end of times across Europe. He is sent to visit a convent run by Lady Isolde, where the nuns suffer terrible visions and inexplicable deaths. Luca has to decide whether Lady Isolde is guilty of witchcraft, or if there are other forces at play....
Changeling, the first in the Order of Darkness series, is Philippa Gregory's first foray into writing for young adults (ages 14+). She is best known as the author of historical titles for adult readers such as The Other Bolyn Girl.
Gregory says she did not set out to write for younger readers. "Although this book is being marketed to YA readers, I don't see this as an exclusive category, older people will read it just as younger people read my other series."
It is also unusual for Gregory in being pure fiction, rather than based on an historical figure, although it is still set in an historical period. She says, "I enjoyed creating fictional characters, there are one or two real life people in the book, but having fictional lead characters set me free and let me determine what happens. It really was a fun thing to do."
The setting, 1453, is new territory for Gregory, as is the Italian and European backdrop. "I have worked on this period before but from an English perspective - Lady Rivers opens up not far from this time. It's a fascinating period where people anticipated momentarily the end of the world and all sorts of things were happening around Europe and there were some extraordinary behaviours. Constantinople falls and there are enormous advances by the Ottoman Empire across Europe, and Christians think this is the first step towards the end of the world."
The time from the Plantagenets to the Tudors is a time when modern Europe was being invented and created through things like language - Shakespeare starts writing - and where there are modern world starts to take shape; but the Medieval world and mind were still changing, says Gregory. "It was a time of extraordinary change and you start to see extraordinary women emerge from the total dominance of the male world."
Novelists, however, cannot simply cover a period of enormous social change like an historian would. "If you are going to bring the period alive for a reader, it has to be about daily life, something you can vividly imagine," says Gregory. "If you simply say that many women got locked up and didn't have a life or a vocation, that's quite boring, but if you say, here's this girl who gets stuck in a nunnery because she won't marry a horrible man; she gets to run the place but cant speak to any man, then the detail makes it interesting."
Every novel, she adds, "has to have the progression of an individual from where they start to where they end up, every novel is about psychological development". At the beginning of Changeling, none of the main characters are in the place where they want to be: Luca was a strange boy to be borne to a normal couple, so people considered him a changeling; Isolde should have been living as a lady in a castle; while Ishraq is a woman from a Muslim world living in a very Christian world. "They will observe extraordinary events and yet they are ordinary people."
Gregory also takes a close look through the novel in how Muslim women are perceived. "In our contemporary world, Muslim women do speak and speak very powerfully but Western media is not tuned to listen to them and in terms of this novel, people weren't tuned in to listen to them at all. In that society, women belonged to a man. If a father died, as in this novel, he left you to the control of your husband or brother or the nunnery; these women choose not to be bound by that."
She also wanted to question our "prejudiced views" of the Muslim world and the way in which society is engaged in "another crusade where we are divided along the lines of race, nationality and religion", she says. In many ways our perceptions of the Muslim world today are actually worse than in Medieval times since people then "had no other way to see the world", Gregory explains.
"Looking back through history, even at the time of the first, second, third or fourth crusade you had people who didn't think in these ways and they challenged those views, just as in my novel Ishraq will change her inheritance and lead other characters to question their perceptions of her and her world." Other books in this series - Gregory has another three planned - will explore the period when the Moors ruled Spain "with total tolerance of Christians and Jews".
Gregory is particularly interested in this period because of her position on feminism. "Writing The Other Bolyn Girl introduced me to the Tudor period. I'm interested in how extreme situations could become for women at that time; Anne Bolyn's position was so unbearable that ultimately Henry VIII killed her. The more I study, the more I see how women's lives have been wasted by a society that didn't allow them any freedom if they stepped outside their very narrow role, they were punished.
"Ishraq is who she is because she has had an education. Muslim women at that time were educated to very senior levels so there was enlightenment in the Muslim world that we didn't have in the Christian world." Gregory points to a Medieval proverb 'Do you value your wife or your oxen more?' "The answer was your wife because she can pull a plough as well as look after you and the children.
"Women were almost not regarded as human but as a beast with a number of skills. When you see how women are treated in a society like that, you see exploitation and violence. People are very romantic about the Medieval period, and yet those lovely ladies in castles were unlikely to ever get out of them.
"It doesn't make me angry as such but I think it's terribly important for women and young girls to be aware of these issues. We have made many extraordinary advances but women still don't get paid equally for equal work, we've still not managed to get these things right, these injustices that are based on being a woman."
The year is 1453 and strange happenings around Europe are seen as signs that the world is ending... Luca Vera is appointed by the Church to record the end of times across Europe.
He is sent to visit a convent run by Lady Isolde, where the nuns suffer terrible visions and inexplicable deaths. Luca has to decide whether Lady Isolde is guilty of witchcraft, or if there are other forces at play....
Changeling, the first in the Order of Darkness series, is Philippa Gregory's first foray into writing for young adults (ages 14+). She is best known as the author of historical titles for adult readers such as The Other Bolyn Girl.
Gregory says she did not set out to write for younger readers. "Although this book is being marketed to YA readers, I don't see this as an exclusive category, older people will read it just as younger people read my other series."
It is also unusual for Gregory in being pure fiction, rather than based on an historical figure, although it is still set in an historical period. She says, "I enjoyed creating fictional characters, there are one or two real life people in the book, but having fictional lead characters set me free and let me determine what happens. It really was a fun thing to do."
The setting, 1453, is new territory for Gregory, as is the Italian and European backdrop. "I have worked on this period before but from an English perspective - Lady Rivers opens up not far from this time. It's a fascinating period where people anticipated momentarily the end of the world and all sorts of things were happening around Europe and there were some extraordinary behaviours. Constantinople falls and there are enormous advances by the Ottoman Empire across Europe, and Christians think this is the first step towards the end of the world."
The time from the Plantagenets to the Tudors is a time when modern Europe was being invented and created through things like language - Shakespeare starts writing - and where there are modern world starts to take shape; but the Medieval world and mind were still changing, says Gregory. "It was a time of extraordinary change and you start to see extraordinary women emerge from the total dominance of the male world."
Novelists, however, cannot simply cover a period of enormous social change like an historian would. "If you are going to bring the period alive for a reader, it has to be about daily life, something you can vividly imagine," says Gregory. "If you simply say that many women got locked up and didn't have a life or a vocation, that's quite boring, but if you say, here's this girl who gets stuck in a nunnery because she won't marry a horrible man; she gets to run the place but cant speak to any man, then the detail makes it interesting."
Every novel, she adds, "has to have the progression of an individual from where they start to where they end up, every novel is about psychological development". At the beginning of Changeling, none of the main characters are in the place where they want to be: Luca was a strange boy to be borne to a normal couple, so people considered him a changeling; Isolde should have been living as a lady in a castle; while Ishraq is a woman from a Muslim world living in a very Christian world. "They will observe extraordinary events and yet they are ordinary people."
Gregory also takes a close look through the novel in how Muslim women are perceived. "In our contemporary world, Muslim women do speak and speak very powerfully but Western media is not tuned to listen to them and in terms of this novel, people weren't tuned in to listen to them at all. In that society, women belonged to a man. If a father died, as in this novel, he left you to the control of your husband or brother or the nunnery; these women choose not to be bound by that."
She also wanted to question our "prejudiced views" of the Muslim world and the way in which society is engaged in "another crusade where we are divided along the lines of race, nationality and religion", she says. In many ways our perceptions of the Muslim world today are actually worse than in Medieval times since people then "had no other way to see the world", Gregory explains.
"Looking back through history, even at the time of the first, second, third or fourth crusade you had people who didn't think in these ways and they challenged those views, just as in my novel Ishraq will change her inheritance and lead other characters to question their perceptions of her and her world." Other books in this series - Gregory has another three planned - will explore the period when the Moors ruled Spain "with total tolerance of Christians and Jews".
Gregory is particularly interested in this period because of her position on feminism. "Writing The Other Bolyn Girl introduced me to the Tudor period. I'm interested in how extreme situations could become for women at that time; Anne Bolyn's position was so unbearable that ultimately Henry VIII killed her. The more I study, the more I see how women's lives have been wasted by a society that didn't allow them any freedom if they stepped outside their very narrow role, they were punished.
"Ishraq is who she is because she has had an education. Muslim women at that time were educated to very senior levels so there was enlightenment in the Muslim world that we didn't have in the Christian world." Gregory points to a Medieval proverb 'Do you value your wife or your oxen more?' "The answer was your wife because she can pull a plough as well as look after you and the children.
"Women were almost not regarded as human but as a beast with a number of skills. When you see how women are treated in a society like that, you see exploitation and violence. People are very romantic about the Medieval period, and yet those lovely ladies in castles were unlikely to ever get out of them.
"It doesn't make me angry as such but I think it's terribly important for women and young girls to be aware of these issues. We have made many extraordinary advances but women still don't get paid equally for equal work, we've still not managed to get these things right, these injustices that are based on being a woman."
