Hilary Mantel called her a “great fictionalising machine”. For more than 30 years, the historical novelist Philippa Gregory has puréed real lives into romantic fiction frequently set in the royal courts of the 15th and 16th century. With titles like The Other Boleyn Girl, The White Queen, The Red Queen, Three Sisters, The Queen’s Fool and The Other Queen, Gregory’s crowning by media as “the queen of British historical fiction” seemed inevitable, even though historians do dispute her accuracy.
Gregory’s fans might argue that romantic history doesn’t have to be accurate – just escapist.
But now the queen is taking a break from queens, and fiction too, taking on the historians with an ambitious non-fiction work covering 900 years of ordinary English women’s lives.
The title, a nod to Sally Rooney’s Normal People, seems awkward, bluntly informative rather than ironic, although Gregory’s women are anything but “normal”. This is because, for centuries, the only traces most women left behind them were in legal documents. Births, deaths, marriages and court cases, some of them arrestingly lurid.
Gregory has spent years writing this book, immersing herself in the lives of rioters, murderers, highway women, pirates, whores, witches, brides, shepherdesses, beggars, midwives, lead miners, ale wives, shipwrights, weavers, farmers, milliners, hermits, jousters, painters, soldiers, gay nuns and “female husbands”, most known from the crumbs they have left in court archives.
The book is a doorstopper, opening with the Norman invasion of 1066 and ending in the modern era with the ordination of women Anglican bishops in England in 2014. Some will revel in this sweeping history of women’s rights, written in a no-nonsense style with only occasional outbreaks of understandable outrage, though fans of Gregory’s fiction may find it overly encyclopedic. “I wanted to write a huge book about women,” she chirrups in her introduction. In this, she has succeeded.
There is much to like about Normal Women. Gregory writes with fluency and vim. She captures the way ordinary women’s lives have changed in the centuries since the Middle Ages, covering every aspect of their lives, from childbirth, sex, marriage, work, faith and death – and she is interested in all English women, not just the straight white ones.
In the Middle Ages, women were their husbands’ property, and some churchmen doubted women had souls. Gregory doesn’t flinch from hair-raising detail about eras unimaginably different from our own. The Treason Act of 1351 decreed that if a wife killed her husband, she could be burnt at the stake. If a husband killed his wife, he faced the noose, a routine penalty at the time. As the wife had violated the authority of a social superior, she had committed a far worse crime.
The surprising corollary of this was that medieval churchmen understood there to be only one basic human body type, she says. Gender was seen as a continuum, with highly masculine men at one end of the scale and very feminine women at the other. To be “in Christ” was to be free of gender. Although the Bible forbade women dressing as men, there were plenty of “warmly approving” medieval tales of women, not only dressing as men, but transforming into them.
While Normal Women is never less than fascinating, Gregory’s approach to factoids is often a little too breezy. Her assertion, for example, that “one in 40 women died in childbirth in England in the 1500 and 1600s” references a book by the Oxford historian Henrietta Leyser, who warns in her text that this figure is an estimate. In the absence of reliable records before the 1800s, maternal mortality is harder to pin down than Gregory makes it seem. Her well-researched history would have lost nothing with a few caveats.
Normal Women isn’t the “radical reframing” of its marketing blurb, any more than it is a “landmark work of scholarship”. In her introduction, Gregory describes wading through original court documents, but her footnotes reveal how much she owes to the work of academic historians like Leyser, Olwen Hufton, the author of The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe, 1500-1800, and Lawrence Stone, who wrote The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 ‒ popular 20th century histories still worth a read. There is nothing wrong with Gregory’s sources but the authors she depends on could have been acknowledged more fulsomely.
Normal Women excels in its readability, diversity and sense of outrage. Gregory isn’t a natural analyst, but she’s never dull, and her book is a timely reminder of the suffering of long-forgotten sisters who, to quote George Eliot, “rest in unvisited tombs”.
