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Good Reading : August 2014
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GOODREADINGMAGAZINE.COM.AU GOOD READING AUGUST 2014 30 COVER STORY and appears on occasional history shows on TV or radio. Last month she featured on Australian TV in an episode of Tony Robinson’s Walking Through History series, examining Tudor times. ‘I really enjoy coming out of the study and working with a broadcast team.’ Philippa has also been actively involved in television and film adaptations of her novels. ‘When you are a writer of novels you will always prefer the book form to any other way of telling a story. But I have been lucky enough to work with excellent teams during my career in television and film. I wrote the adaptation for the BBC of A Respectable Trade, which told the story of the slavery of African captives in England, and I learned a lot in that process. I was resident writer for the BBC adaptation of The Other Boleyn Girl. I also worked closely with the fine screenwriter Peter Morgan on the film version of the The Other Boleyn Girl and was executive producer on The White Queen, s o I have been close to all the major productions of my novels. ‘There is something very wonderful when the story comes alive in another medium and it is magical when I see the actors in costume bringing the parts to life.’ She still finds wr iting about history hugely interesting, and says the reading, thinking, studying, visiting locations and understanding history has been her work and love for almost 40 years. ‘The challenges associated with this [include] when the view of something changes – like finding the body of Richard III and the resiting of the Battle of Bosworth – or the challenge of simply not having the material. While many of her novels expose the foibles and limitations of many of Britain’s former monarchs and those who courted them, she thinks very highly of the present royal family. ‘I don’t think you could be brought up in Britain and not admire the Queen but, like many people, I think we should have a slimmed-down, economy royal family. I think it’s bad for a society to have snobbery enshrined in its institutions and this is bound to happen with hereditary privileges.’ Like Queen Elizabeth II, many of the women in Philippa’s novels are intelligent, industrious and have a strong sense of duty. They are also constrained by the social expectations of their times. ‘Without any plan or missionary intention, it seems to have become my life’s work to research relatively unknown women and tell their stories, from their point of view,’ she says. ‘I do this because I am interested in the history of the unknown and oppressed people and I think it important that their story should be told. Of course, I am a woman and I am sympathetic to, and inspired by, women’s history. And I am a feminist in that I think that the history of women has been wrongly neglected and should be widely known. ‘What has been so amazing for me is how my novels have brought these characters out of obscur ity and into the histor ical record. When I first researched for The Other Boleyn Girl, Mary Boleyn was in the footnotes of every history book. Now there are four biographies on her, all published after and mostly recognising my novel.’ The King’s Curse by Philippa Gregory is published by Simon and Schuster, rrp $32.99. ‘I think it’s bad for a society to have snobbery enshrined in its institutions and this is bound to happen with hereditary privileges.’ 28_30_cover_story.indd 30 9/07/14 10:54 PM
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