Philippa Gregory

• 1. Introduction

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  Philippa Gregory was born on the 9th of January 1954 in Nairobi, then the capital city of the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya. Decades later, AudioFile magazine would call her "the queen of British historical fiction." But that title was a long time coming, and the road to it ran through journalism colleges, BBC radio studios, a doctorate on circulating libraries, and a cottage on the Pennine Way where she wrote her first novel while caring for a baby. How does a child who earned a B in English and two E grades in History and Geography at A-level become the writer who put medieval noblewomen back at the centre of English history? And what happens when a novelist insists her imaginative reconstructions carry historical weight?

• 2. An Unlikely Scholar

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  Colston's Girls' School in Bristol was not especially kind to the young Philippa Gregory. Her grades were unimpressive and she described herself as a "rebel." After school she trained in journalism in Cardiff, then spent a year as an apprentice at the Portsmouth News before eventually securing a place on an English literature degree at the University of Sussex, where she promptly switched to history. She graduated from Sussex with a B.A. in history in 1982. From there she went north to the University of Edinburgh, where she completed a Ph.D. in 1985; her thesis examined the popular fiction sold through 18th-century commercial circulating libraries. She then worked for BBC radio for two years and went on to teach at the University of Durham, the University of Teesside, and the Open University. Kingston University made her a fellow in 1994.

• 3. The Novel She Wrote in a Cottage

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  Wideacre came into existence while Gregory was finishing her doctorate. She lived in a cottage on the Pennine Way with her first husband Peter Chislett, who was the editor of the Hartlepool Mail, and their baby daughter. The book is a story about the love of land and incest, and it launched the Lacey trilogy, followed by The Favoured Child and Meridon. Gregory and Chislett divorced before Wideacre was published. The novel appeared in 1987, and its success pointed toward the kind of territory she would return to again and again: women whose desires and choices history had largely ignored. Her early contemporary fiction and children's books ran alongside this historical work, but the Tudor period would eventually become the ground she knew best.

• 4. The Other Boleyn Girl

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  The Other Boleyn Girl, published in 2001, became the novel most readers associate with Gregory's name. It tells the story of Anne Boleyn's sister Mary and portrays Anne as cold and ruthless, narrating events from a perspective that leaves open the possibility that Mary believed the charges of adultery and incest levelled against her sister. In the year of publication the book won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award from the Romantic Novelists' Association. A BBC television adaptation followed in 2003, starring Natascha McElhone, Jodhi May, and Jared Harris. Then Miramax bought the film rights and released a second film in February 2008, with Eric Bana, Natalie Portman, and Scarlett Johansson. The book also generated a long sequence of sequels: The Queen's Fool, The Virgin's Lover, The Constant Princess, The Boleyn Inheritance, and The Other Queen.

• 5. The Plantagenet World

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  The White Queen, published in 2009, opened a different chapter in Gregory's career. It centres on Elizabeth Woodville, the wife of Edward IV, and began her exploration of the Wars of the Roses and the Plantagenet rulers who preceded the Tudors. The Red Queen followed in 2010, focusing on Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry VII and grandmother to Henry VIII. The Lady of the Rivers, published in 2011, traced the life of Jacquetta of Luxembourg, Elizabeth Woodville's mother. The Kingmaker's Daughter in 2012 concerned Anne Neville, wife of Richard III. The White Princess in 2013 examined Elizabeth of York, who was Henry VII's wife and Henry VIII's mother. The BBC adapted three of these novels into a 10-part series for BBC One in 2013. Helen Brown of The Telegraph wrote in that year that Gregory had made a career out of breathing "passionate, independent life" into noblewomen whose personalities had previously "lain flat on family trees, remembered only as diplomatic currency and brood mares."

• 6. History or Fiction?

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  Gregory includes an author's note in each of her novels that addresses the boundary between fact and imagination, along with a further reading list. In an interview with The Times in 2017, she described her books as a "gateway drug," a means by which readers find their way into serious history. Not every historian has been grateful for the path she opened. The controversial historian David Starkey told The Telegraph in 2013 that readers "really should stop taking historical novelists seriously as historians" and described Gregory's work as "good Mills and Boon." The scholar Susan Bordo went further, criticising what she called Gregory's "self-deceptive and self-promoting chutzpah" in claiming meticulous historical fidelity. The novelist Robin Maxwell, who acknowledged that Gregory's books brought many readers to historical fiction, refused to write a blurb for The Other Boleyn Girl, describing its portrayal of Anne Boleyn as "vicious, unsupportable." David Loades, a Tudor historian at the University of Wales, argued that the book would have been safer had Gregory claimed to be writing fiction outright, because that is what she was doing. The White Princess generated a different kind of controversy: both the 2013 novel and its 2017 television adaptation suggest that Elizabeth of York had a romantic relationship with her uncle Richard III and that early relations between Elizabeth and Henry VII may have been non-consensual. The author Samantha Wilcoxson wrote on her website that portraying someone as a rapist "when there is no reason to believe that they ever were is defamation of the dead, not literary license."

• 7. Wells and the Gambia

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  In 1993, Gregory was in The Gambia conducting research for A Respectable Trade, her novel about the 18th-century slave trade set in Bristol. What began as a research trip became a decades-long commitment. She established a small charity called Gardens for The Gambia, which has since dug close to 200 low-technology, low-budget wells in school and community gardens. The wells irrigate plots that provide meals for the poorest children and produce a cash crop to fund school supplies, seeds, and tools. The charity has also run a beekeeping scheme, feeding programmes, and educational workshops in batik and pottery. In recognition of this work alongside her literary output, Gregory was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2021 Birthday Honours. The CBE citation covered services to literature and to charity in both the UK and The Gambia.

• 8. Beyond the Novels

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  In 2023, Gregory published Normal Women, a non-fiction work tracing the lives of women in England across 900 years, from the Norman Conquest to the present day. The Sunday Times bestseller was shortlisted for a Parliamentary Book Award in 2023 and for best non-fiction narrative at the British Book Awards in 2024. A podcast series accompanying the book was nominated for Best New Podcast at the Aria awards in 2024. Gregory also produced an illustrated version of Normal Women for teenage readers. In 2024, her play Richard, My Richard, examining Richard III, was performed at Shakespeare North Playhouse and Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds. The following year, Boleyn Traitor appeared, adding Jane Boleyn's story to the long-running Plantagenet and Tudor Novels series. And in February 2026, Gregory called publicly for the abolition of the monarchy.