It was nearly 40 years ago that Philippa Gregory’s debut novel, Wideacre, was published, lauded at the time as a “bodice-ripper with brains” given the number of sex scenes which it contained.
The Georgian England romp, published in 1987, is being adapted by Happy Prince, the team behind last year’s TV production of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals — but Gregory is expecting to find the promotion a bit “weird”.
Everybody will want to talk to her about sex when the TV series comes out, she predicts. But sex, in her experience, is something that she has felt “different about at different stages” of her life.
Gregory, now 71, said: “It’s going to be a little bit weird to be talking about the joys of sex, when it’s not the most important thing any more.
“It’s different writing about it when you’re at peak sexual activity and pre-children. You feel different about sex at different stages of your life. Or at any rate, I do. I don’t know if everybody does, but I certainly see a change in my own personal sexuality and libido, and certainly that’s reflected in the writing.”
Gregory, whose bestselling novel The Other Boleyn Girl was adapted in 2008 into film starring Natalie Portman as Anne Boleyn and Scarlett Johansson as Mary Boleyn, said she is still very interested in using sex as a metaphor within her work.
The production company behind Rivals, Happy Prince, is adapting Philippa Gregory’s first novel
ROBERT VIGLASKY
In her upcoming novel, Boleyn Traitor, which will be published next month, she has included “tender” lovemaking between the courtier Thomas Culpeper and Henry VIII’s fifth wife, Catherine Howard.
She said: “I was so glad to have in the heart of this novel — which is about male power and male toxicity — a relationship which really suggests the possibilities of an equal, tender, loving, passionate sexual relationship.”
The main character in the novel is the lady-in-waiting Jane Boleyn, better known as Lady Rochford, the sister-in-law of Anne Boleyn, who served five of Henry VIII’s six wives.
Jane was executed at the Tower of London in February 1542, condemned for facilitating Catherine Howard’s infidelities, an act of treason. Gregory believes that Jane may have been a spy for Thomas Cromwell.
She added: “It’s not history — it’s speculation. It’s putting together things. So I’m publishing it as a novel, but what normally happens when I say something in a novel, quite often a historian will then check it out and they will find evidence which we haven’t found.”
Gregory, born in Kenya while her father was serving as a radio operator and navigator for East African Airways, has written more than 40 books that have been translated into more than 30 languages and sold more than 12 million copies.
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Like a growing number of people, she now lives in a multi-generational home — mainly with her daughter, Victoria, in Leicestershire, but also with her son, Adam, in Haringey, north London.
She explained: “I live with my daughter and son-in-law. We’ve got two wings of our house. Post-Covid, we bought a house together, and they have one wing and they have their own front door and kitchen …[Victoria] will pop in and she’ll say: ‘Should we have a glass of wine?’ And we’ll sit in the garden and we’ll have a glass of wine. It’s just lovely.”
Gregory, who has been divorced three times, describes her daughter’s two young sons as “the loves of my life”.
She said her son “observed quite closely” when she was living with his sister for about six months, and then suggested they do the same thing in London.
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It is important to Gregory that her house is surrounded by good hiking routes, as she finds walking invaluable for her writing process. She explained: “I’ve never suffered badly from writer’s block, but I have got stuck at times in the past, and I’ve developed techniques for what to do. I should market it. You have to have a dog, and you have to live somewhere that you can walk out from.
“You take your dog and you make a sandwich and you take a bottle of water and you put them in your pocket. And you say to your dog, ‘We’re going on an infinite walk.’ And you say to your subconscious ‘I’m not going to stop walking until I have figured out how to solve this problem’.”
The author walks with her Irish setter, But-a. “I’ve wanted to have a hound called But-a ever since I thought of the joke. I can remember thinking of the joke and falling around at my own humour, I was about 25. I’ve had loads of dogs, but this is my first proper hound. I suppose her full title is ‘But-a Hound Dog’,” she said.
Gregory has attracted many fans over the years, from the former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell-Horner, who also wrote a book inspired by Anne Boleyn, to the Sex and the City author Candice Bushnell and Queen Camilla.
The Queen’s Reading Room website, which promotes reading, describes Gregory as “one of the world’s foremost historical novelists” and picked one of her titles, Dark Tides, for its book list.
She said: “The Queen reads my books, and we had a deal when I used to publish earlier in the year that I’d get her an advance copy for Balmoral. [Charles and Camilla typically spend much of August to October in Balmoral.] When my publisher said we’re changing the publication date of Boleyn Traitor to October, I said, ‘But we’re going to miss Balmoral’.”