Philippa Gregory, the British novelist known for her historical fiction, has shared the books that influenced her life and work, from childhood favourites to the 18th-century novels she studied for her PhD.
Early Reading and Influences
Gregory's earliest reading memory is of her mother reading bedtime stories, but by around age three she was reading the text herself rather than looking at pictures. After that, she read to herself and would borrow four books a week from the library.
Her favourite book growing up was Alison Uttley's The Little White Horse, which combined history and gothic fantasy. She described it as realistic, charming and frightening without being nightmarish, and it started her love of historical fiction. It has since become a family favourite for her own children.
Books That Changed Her Perspective
As a teenager, Gregory was a voracious reader and enjoyed Rudyard Kipling before moving on to historical fiction, especially Georgette Heyer. She read all of Jane Austen's novels early on and learned to love her economy of style and precision, calling her the finest writer in the English language.
The writer who changed her mind was EP Thompson, whose The Making of the English Working Class was a revelation to her as a young woman. It made her understand the real importance of writing history and the passion a great historian can bring, and it became a model for her own work in finding and writing hidden history.
The Craft of Novel Writing
For her PhD thesis, Gregory read more than 100 of the most popular novels of the 18th century, including Don Quixote, Clarissa, Gulliver's Travels and Moll Flanders. She described it as the perfect author's apprenticeship, as she analysed the novels and learned about structure, characterisation and tempo at the very time novels were being invented.
She came to Charles Dickens later in life and now considers him one of the great writers of the big book, citing Dombey and Son as a favourite for its combination of sentimentalism around a frail child and a story about a merciless social climber.
Books for Comfort and Discovery
Gregory rereads Iris Murdoch's The Sea, the Sea whenever she needs comfort, describing it as a book far from her own concerns yet entirely about the human struggle to own the person you love and to free yourself from vanity and greed.
She discovered Molly Keane, a between-the-wars Anglo-Irish novelist, recently. Keane's novels tell stories of the eccentric Anglo-Irish wealthy elite while remaining aware of the injustice underpinning that society. Gregory highlighted Good Behaviour, about a pair of siblings who live for hunting on an enormous estate, as a wonderful picture of a society that has completely disappeared.
Gregory's latest novel, Royal Witch, is published by HarperCollins.
