Philippa Gregory On The Book That Started Her Love Of Historical Fiction
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57 minutes ago
The beloved queen of historical fiction is back with a new Tudor novel, Boleyn Traitor
With more than 30 novels under her belt, we’re pleased to see the beloved queen of historical fiction plunging back into our (and her) favourite terrain: the Tudors. Philippa Gregory has written about the Boleyn family aplenty, but this time is different: she is armed with new research to shed light on another complex member of the fold.
Wife of Anne Boleyn’s brother George, Jane Rochford Boleyn’s evidence sent not one but two queens to the scaffold. In Boleyn Traitor (out 7 October 2025) she watches from the sidelines of court, skillfully playing the room and its chess-like politics in order to survive. But in a court ruled by ambition and violence, Jane knows one wrong move could cost her everything.
This is far from Philippa’s first dalliance with forgotten women – and we’re sure it won’t be her last. In this edition of Shelf Life – where authors tell C&TH about the books that shaped them – Philippa details the book that made her fall in love with historical fiction, the title that made her realise women are missing from our history books, and the book she can’t stop returning to.
Shelf Life: Philippa Gregory
This book made me a reader…
The first book I ever read by myself was a Little Grey Rabbit book by Alison Uttley. Illustrations are so important for children’s books and this whole series had beautiful miniature watercolours. I was allowed, age four, to look at the pictures before I went to sleep and I learned to read the words.
This book made me want to be a writer…
There were many books before and after Elizabeth Goudge’s The Little White Horse (1946), but it holds a special place in heart. It’s a wonderful historical children’s novel in which a Victorian child heroine goes into a fantasy nightmare world where she has to defeat evil and win her inheritance. And (spoiler) she wins! It started my love of historical fiction.
This book was formative in my youth…
I read all of Jane Austen’s novels very early on and learned to love her economy of style and precision. She still seems to me the finest writer in the English language.
This book is one I can’t stop returning to…
George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871) – great women characters here from one of the greatest women writers. Magnificent Dorothea is a scholarly girl who mistakes love of study for love of the scholar and marries the wrong man. But even the right man is not her equal. A wonderfully nuanced picture of how difficult it is to be a highly intelligent woman with a great capacity for love. Other women characters are similarly complex, I return to them time and time again.
This book broadened my horizons…
Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden from History: 300 Years of Women’s Oppression and the Fight Against It (1977). I am a huge fan of Rowbotham’s work. This book first introduced me to the idea that half of our history is untold: women were missing.
This book is my comfort blanket…
The Country and the City by Raymond Williams (1973). I love this book. It describes the literature of the English countryside with meticulous literary criticism and precise geography, the long tradition of the pastoral and the relationship of people to the land. Deeply moving, it is a love song from a great writer and historian to the people and the land that he loved and understood.
I wish I’d written this book…
So many! I wish I had written everything by Jane Austen, certainly everything by EM Forster. I have a library full of classics that I’d have loved to write, each of them masterclasses in storytelling and language. They’ve all shaped my writing career. Reading good novels is the one piece of advice I give to anyone who wants to become an author. In the case of both Austen and Forster they write with great simplicity, the sentences are really transparent. There’s nothing grandiose or pompous about the writing and it makes the books seem simple when in fact they are layered and complex.
I can’t stop talking about this book right now…
I’m really enjoying Mollie Keane’s Good Behaviour (1981), about a pair of adorable siblings who live for fox hunting in an enormous estate and care for nothing but each other, their horses and dogs. It’s so charming but has a subtle awareness of the injustices in society.
I recommend this book to anyone and everyone who will listen…
For children: Quacky Quack Quack by Ian Whybrow (1991). For adults: Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine (2010). You will never again get stuck in a pub arguing about whether women can park.
Boleyn Traitor by Philippa Gregory
Published 7 October 2025 by HarperCollins.
Hardback, £25
