Philippa Gregory's novels are fast-moving and well-researched, but perhaps their greatest strength is how they rescue women from "the shadows of history". Take Mary Boleyn, for example, the heroine of "The Other Boleyn Girl" and one of Gregory's favorites. "She's an extraordinary character and she'd been largely lost to history before I read her story and presented it to a world that had forgotten her."
Gregory is a sympathetic female historian who finds pleasure of in saving women's reputations. "History takes a very narrow view of women. They weren't defined in terms of what they thought, what they tried to do, or what they achieved, but primarily in terms of their sexual nature." In "The Boleyn Inheritance", she focuses on three female characters "who had been judged very harshly by history". Implicitly, in this novel, she invites readers "not to assume that women who sleep with men are whores and woman who are fat are stupid." She asks instead that her readers "step back for a minute and think about them as if they were real people. What their real backgrounds were, what their real ambitions may have been and what their real achievements are. You get a very different picture."
Currently she's working on a novel about Mary Queen of Scots set during her captivity. "Most people write about her in Scotland, but she actually spent the majority of her life in captivity in England with George Talbot and his wife Bess of Hardwick. In the book, you've got three extraordinary characters that were locked up together for 16 years."
Gregory spends six to eight months researching, but it's hearing her characters' voices in her head that turns facts into fiction. "To make the book sing for me, I have to get the voice right. Then everything follows." Her writing makes an easy translation to audio and Gregory sees how audio enhances the immediacy of her historical novels. "I try to get readers in the place and the time, putting as little between them and the unfolding of the story as possible. But a good performance on an audio gets you immediately there. You don't have the interference of words on page, they come directly into your ears and that's much more lively. It's almost as if we escape the publication stage, as if I'm just telling readers the story."
Gregory had a strange experience the first time she heard one of her novels read aloud. The BBC ran "The Virgin Earth" as a radio book and she settled down at half-past ten ready for a bedtime story. But "the images were my images, the rhythms were my rhythms, the language was my language, the words were the words I knew and it was so congruent with my thought process that there was nothing to keep me awake. It was so intensely lulling that I went straight to sleep."
Gregory knows the power of reading aloud and its place in history. While studying for her PhD. in 18th century novels, she learned that the vast majority of people were illiterate and "the blacksmith would borrow a book from the library and everybody would come to the forge where it was warm and light and listen to him read." She belives, "voice will always have immediacy over written word. We're all hard-wired to listen to a human voice telling us a story; it goes back to Stone Age campfires."
If she could go back in time, what period would she choose? "If you're going back in time as a woman you should never go before the vote, before the Married Woman's Property Act and before the invention of contraception because you will be poor, disenfranchised, and pregnant. If you're a woman and they offer you a time machine, just say no."