Philippa Gregory: a writer who blends historical facts with fiction.

Philippa Gregory: a writer who blends historical facts with fiction.
By Isabella Alfano

“She enables me to immerse myself in history.”
So says my friend Claudia, who shares my passion for English novelist Philippa Gregory. But what makes her historical novels so appealing? Is historical fiction more fascinating than history? I started asking myself these questions soon after reading Una Principessa per due re (2013) the Italian translation of The White Princess, from the Cousins’ War series.

While reading it, I was soon lost in a world of precious tapestries, royal castles, virginal maids, power intrigues and courtly romances. But there was something more, someone forgotten by history. I did not know Richard of York, a key figure in the novel and mentioned by Philippa Gregory as a boy.

Who was Richard? When I started reading up on him, to my great surprise I found that Gregory’s fictional version differed from documented history. Was Philippa Gregory wrong? No, she was just fictionalizing.

History has always been a primary source for literature and this is true also for the writer Philippa Gregory and her novels. A generic definition of historical novel is that it is a fictional story based on real historical facts. However, it is also true that documented historical facts are not the most important part of such a novel. It seems to me that the question is whether historical novelists have to be accurate in reporting history, or whether they can distort historical facts to meet literary demands.

Nobody can possibly know exactly what happened or how people felt in distant ages. One user of LibraryThing forum is of the same mind, as he writes “No-one other than Catherine of Aragon, Arthur, and Henry really knows if her first marriage was consummated or not.”

This means that it is useless for me to ask how much truth can be found in historical novels and in particular in those by Philippa Gregory. However, many readers seem concerned about the historical reliability of this writer’s texts and some justify her unfaithfulness to the history reported in historical documents.

One user in Historum.com forum writes that Philippa Gregory is “writing a story, not a true and factual account of historical events” and in “Historical Novels are back in fashion”, Kathryn Hadley explains Jerome de Groot’s idea that “the reader is knowingly drawn into a manifestly false but historically detailed world.” These are Gregory’s supporters.

On the other hand, there are people who do not appreciate the writer’s way of presenting history or historical characters. Turning Henry VII into the King of human weakness, constantly worrying about revolts, or into a lovely husband, makes her a poor quality writer, who “gets all details wrong” in a “super repetitive soft porn novel”. This is what YouTube user AndurilForTheDunedan maintains in her two videos on why Philippa Gregory’s historical fiction are “based on lies.”

AndurilForTheDunedan also takes into account Catherine of Aragon, another of Gregory’s characters, in her videos. “Catherine does not lie, but her entire existence (in the novel) is built on a lie”. Gregory’s fans find this critique “fairly dramatic”, but even some of them argue that her characters are “rather flat and one dimensional” and that her “historical inaccuracies” are questionable.

To conclude, it is difficult to reach a consensus on Gregory’s presentation of history. For me, a good historical novel does not necessarily have to be faithful to history, but it has to reveal something about the present. As Philippa Gregory said, “You are talking about 500 years ago, but also you are talking about things we understand now, about ambition, about desire and about fear.”

Maybe the real issue is how this writer reshapes history, how she manages to let her character speak to us and to our feelings.