Philippa Gregory's novels adapted by BBC

The Jubilee seems a fitting weekend to have the Queen of historical fiction talk at Hay Festival, and after the success of the blockbuster adaptation of The Other Boleyn Girl, Gregory’s novels show no sign of slowing as she is set to release her newest installment this summer. “I find myself stepping back in time getting more and more interested in these fascinating women,” she told Stephanie Merritt, revealing to the audience that the order in which she writes her books is the order of her “research interest” – the research comes first; the book afterwards.

 

Gregory said she felt she had “discovered” Mary Boleyn, sister to Henry VIII’s second wife, after stumbling inadvertently upon a piece of information while researching a different novel – that Henry VIII launched a ship named the Mary Boleyn. “I thought it must be a mistake,” she said, recalling how she didn’t recognise the name, only to discover that Mary Boleyn “only existed in footnotes in history”. As it turned out, the ‘other’ Boleyn girl was Henry’s lover and probably bore him two children – one of them a boy, which his wife Anne couldn’t give him. Gregory said she was “astonished” at the revelation – “why doesn’t everybody know this?”

 

She said she is skeptical of bringing Mary Boleyn – “my Mary” – into the public eye, feeling responsible for her in a way. “Hilary Mantel wrote her in Wolf Hall in her green petticoat, and I thought: my Mary? She’s now fully recognised in history.”

 

Gregory said that when writing on true historic events and telling a real woman’s story, “you have all the facts but have to take off the misogynist filter; take off all the interpretation”. Elizabeth Woodville (The White Queen) is her favourite female character, she admitted. “I spend all day with them, I see them more than my grown-up children. And I don’t forget their names, unlike my children.”

 

Gregory came across as an author who really cares for her characters, who she said are all “raging feminists”. “Slowly but surely,” she said, “I’m working my way through history – I may even get up to our present Queen”. So obsessed with history is she, she said she sometimes even “dreams in period”, and that’s when she knows she has to take a few days’ break.