YouSaid · the spoken record

Philippa Gregory

lines on the record: 31
first: 2024-10-01
most recent: 2024-10-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“character which historians tell us has not yet developed, because most Tudor historians would tell you that noble women do not marry for love, and there's a woman defending marrying for love, choosing her husband, marrying him against her obligations to her family. That's extraordinary in the Tudor period, and there she is saying it, and as soon as I read that I went like here's my next novel It's going to be fabulous and I just got her so it's wonderful when I get a genuine document yeah. See all fired up by it, just thinking about it. I know, I don't love it.”
2024-10-01 · Intelligence Squared · Philippa Gregory and Tracy Chevalier on Weaving the Story into Historical Fiction, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I write historically real people, and sometimes I do have their writings. Sometimes it's no use to me at all, so like a lot of Elizabeth's letters are in Latin, and that's of no use to me whatsoever, but every now and then there's a real gift, so there's only one existing letter written by Mary Bullin, and she wrote it to Thomas Cromwell, who had the divine sense to file it, so we've got a letter from a tudor woman of no particular importance which has been preserved, and she's defending her marriage for love, which is again unique in the Tudor period. It's the only letter I know that defends a marriage for love by a noble woman to a man of lesser status. And as soon as I got that, I went I get you, I know exactly.”
2024-10-01 · Intelligence Squared · Philippa Gregory and Tracy Chevalier on Weaving the Story into Historical Fiction, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I suppose most of my main characters are are fictional. But sometimes I take voices from the time and combine them and I take the tone and the The emphasis from other people's voices. and create Sense. And a lot of times I don't really know what they sound like until I start writing. And actually I get to know them because I take them through scenes. And the further I get into the book, the better I know them. And often I get to the end and I know them very well and I go back and rewrite the first bit because that's when I didn't really know how. and I'll look back and see what they're saying and thinking and think, oh no, actually what she'd really think is this way. So it's a development.”
2024-10-01 · Intelligence Squared · Philippa Gregory and Tracy Chevalier on Weaving the Story into Historical Fiction, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Question number two source material and at what point that becomes fictional? Is the person who asked the question? Is that a proper summary of what you asked?”
2024-10-01 · Intelligence Squared · Philippa Gregory and Tracy Chevalier on Weaving the Story into Historical Fiction, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“because it's the theme that Knowing now what I'm doing. And I can't tell you what an enjoyable process it is. I imagine you know what an enjoyable process it is, but it's like becoming yourself in a way. It's almost like a fantastic course of self-development that by the time I finish the book I know what it was”
2024-10-01 · Intelligence Squared · Philippa Gregory and Tracy Chevalier on Weaving the Story into Historical Fiction, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is the first thing that I wouldn't say yeah, same thing I don't write for an audience and I don't write to entertain, I don't write to educate I literally write because I Can't bear not to it's it's just like I get an idea and I wouldn't be I couldn't I wouldn't be able to sleep I wouldn't be able to do anything else until I started writing it's a very it's very visceral for me and I don't know I know what it's about because it's going to be it's usually about it's almost always about a woman and it's usually about a historical woman so that gives me my about and that in a sense gives me in my narrative that since it's a real life historical woman it's going to be the events of her life but my interpretation of them but the theme I don't know until I finished and one of the most interesting things for me is to finish the book and to then go well I can see what it's about but what's the point of it? Why is it even worth why did I go to all this?”
2024-10-01 · Intelligence Squared · Philippa Gregory and Tracy Chevalier on Weaving the Story into Historical Fiction, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our son is a bastard, and he just disappears off, and the marriages is null and void because they both declare it didn't happen, although it was announced in the newspapers. And you would think in Jane Austen's London that she would descend into total shame and disgrace and never show her face in polite society again. But no, because she is still the richest woman in England. And so she gets Hogarth to paint her portrait.”
2024-10-01 · Intelligence Squared · Philippa Gregory and Tracy Chevalier on Weaving the Story into Historical Fiction, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“incest. Those were the most popular. Causes for divorce for women. And in the 200 years in which those causes were available for women, only four women managed to get a divorce on the basis that their husband was also sleeping with his sister, which even to the eighteenth century was a bit much. So she's absolutely stuck. She's got a child by him, a little boy, but her husband is running through her son's inheritance, and he's running through her money, and without a doubt, when he's run through the money if he wants to leave her, he just can. So what does a woman in those circumstances do? In Jane Austen's London She says that they were never married. She says that she's a whore. She says that her son's a bastard. She declares herself a single woman. And he doesn't have the balls to do anything about it. He just says yes okay We weren't married.”
2024-10-01 · Intelligence Squared · Philippa Gregory and Tracy Chevalier on Weaving the Story into Historical Fiction, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they lived very happily for a little while and they had a child together, a son, and then she discovered that he had taken her shares in the East India Company, which is like taking your shares in I can't think of anything so incredibly successful. Google, Google. So he basically, as her husband, he took all her money and he was starting to run through it. And though as his wife, prior to eighteen fifty, there was absolutely nothing she could do. He was her husband, everything that she earned became his on marriage. She couldn't even complain, there was nothing to complain about, and she couldn't possibly divorce him because divorce was not available for women just because they were aggrieved. They had to, the husbands had to be adulterous, and something worse. It wasn't enough just to be adulterous, that was for a woman. It had to be adulterous plus buggery.”
2024-10-01 · Intelligence Squared · Philippa Gregory and Tracy Chevalier on Weaving the Story into Historical Fiction, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“married a rotter. She married a local let Lord Hamilton, who was the second son of a Duke, and he was a handsome guardsman, and she had enormous shares in the East India Company, and she had two properties, a lovely house in London, big house in London, and a lovely house in what they called the country Islington.”
2024-10-01 · Intelligence Squared · Philippa Gregory and Tracy Chevalier on Weaving the Story into Historical Fiction, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and the wonderful designer looked at me and I said What about an image which is made up of hundreds of individual images of women of history and he went off and had a little thought to think about it and he produced this No, it's fine. It's a Hogarth portrait of a woman, but every single little pixelation of it is an image of a woman. I just love it. I'm so pleased with it. And the reason that I'm talking to you about in answer to the question is that this is Mary Edwards. She was the most the richest heiress in England, round about the time of Jane Austen, end of the eighteenth century, and she was”
2024-10-01 · Intelligence Squared · Philippa Gregory and Tracy Chevalier on Weaving the Story into Historical Fiction, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think one of my favourites and it happened when you have a book coming out you go into your publishers and you talk about it and you usually have a conversation about the jacket and I have spent I heard a little gasp of grief a knowing look there we know don't we go and you talk about the jacket and you say I want it to look like this or this or this or imagine that and by and large they nod at you and say yes and then go and do what's currently exciting or fashionable or what worked well for your jacket before and you get sort of stuck in this terrific rut. So I went into my publisher's Harper Collins and I said what I want is something that represents the fact that this isn't about one woman or ten women or even fifty women, but it's about millions of women over centuries.”
2024-10-01 · Intelligence Squared · Philippa Gregory and Tracy Chevalier on Weaving the Story into Historical Fiction, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just to remind you that in a few minutes time I am going to open it up to questions to you so please do have a think about what you want to ask. It's a great opportunity. They're happy to answer anything within reason so please do think about that. Just before I open it up to the audience. Philippa, was there anything that surprised you? I mean, I presume there are lots of things that surprised you in the course of your research. Just share one or two.”
2024-10-01 · Intelligence Squared · Philippa Gregory and Tracy Chevalier on Weaving the Story into Historical Fiction, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“a woman an American woman who's been there twenty years and she makes jewelry she's made this and she said she's married to a maestro a Miranese maestro and his family is making it for generations and she said they're really the respect is not quite there yet it's not quite you know I think the men are somewhat dismissive of what women make and that's going to take a long time to change and she helped me a lot with the glassmaker and when she read it she said she cried because she recognized herself and her fellow women, glassmakers in the book. Things have shifted but they haven't shifted. That's quite dispiriting actually.”
2024-10-01 · Intelligence Squared · Philippa Gregory and Tracy Chevalier on Weaving the Story into Historical Fiction, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She women in fourteen eighty six did not work in furnaces. They did not work in glass, but with the odd exception like Maria Brovier. And now they can, but do they? So if you go to Mirano now, there are some women occasionally, you see, and there are women making smaller stuff, making beads and figurines and things, but over a flame. But there are very few still in working the furnaces. I mean, I have seen one or two. It's not impossible, and there aren't the barriers. It's not like they can't go to glass school, so to speak, or apply to be an apprentice. Back in the day, they wouldn't have. So those are the shifts that I've made, but it's the mentality that hasn't really shifted. So when I was doing my research on Murano, I got to know”
2024-10-01 · Intelligence Squared · Philippa Gregory and Tracy Chevalier on Weaving the Story into Historical Fiction, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the other thing that I really, really want to say is that in the Elizabethan, under Elizabethan law, if a rapist came to court, he would be found guilty, an accused rapist was found guilty at a rate of about twenty percent. So that's not great, that's eighty percent wandering off, happily, doing it again. But the number of accused people, men coming to court and the convicted of rape is now point two percent. And that's we've got a police force. They didn't have a police force in the Elizabethan Age. We've got all the science, we've got detectives, we've got DNA. What we have is a greater acceptance of sexual violence against women than in the Elizabethan period. And that's not progress. That's beyond shocking.”
2024-10-01 · Intelligence Squared · Philippa Gregory and Tracy Chevalier on Weaving the Story into Historical Fiction, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's between three quarters and ninety percent of the mail rate today in England. So, you know, it's worth remembering that the medieval, that certainly I don't believe at all in linear progress. Certainly I don't believe at all in upward progress. I think it goes a bit forward and then you get a pushback and you get a pushback because it suits employers and owners not to pay equal pay. It suits everybody to have an unpaid reserve army of unemployed women that will step up when they're needed and will go back to the home when they're not. So there's we live in a society which really depends upon the exploitation of poor women. I mean shame on us.”
2024-10-01 · Intelligence Squared · Philippa Gregory and Tracy Chevalier on Weaving the Story into Historical Fiction, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and landowners start trying to crush wages down and the easiest way to do that is to crush women's wages down and to enlist male workers in doing that. So the guild starts saying women can't be in the guilds and women can't be masters and they start invoking the laws about women not owning property. So that's all going on. So there's a so-called golden period of time which we must remember because in thirteen forty nine women and men had equal pay. That's the last time we had equal pay thirteen forty nine, since then with equal pay legislation we still don't even have it now.”
2024-10-01 · Intelligence Squared · Philippa Gregory and Tracy Chevalier on Weaving the Story into Historical Fiction, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“skilled trades of them working apprentices and becoming masters of their crafts, women drive the London property market, they're the big owners of property. They are dominant in the textile industry, which is the biggest industry that England has at the time, and they're dominant in the food, drink and hospitality business, which means that they are the theatre owners. When William Shakespeare comes to London and writes plays, he would have negotiated with women, theatre impressarios,'cause they own the ale houses where all the plays are put. And like, I didn't know that until I started this research. Just fascinating. So there is a peak time which historians identify of women's success, and that gets gradually squashed down as the balance of the population changes after the plague and as employers”
2024-10-01 · Intelligence Squared · Philippa Gregory and Tracy Chevalier on Weaving the Story into Historical Fiction, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, every time of crisis creates an opportunity for women to step forward and women always do step forward, partly in a self sacrificing way to help because I think that's really trained into us. I don't believe it's nature, but I think it's really trained into us. But partly because there's this unexploited reservoir of female ability and female talent and female determination, which is only allowed out from time to time when for some reason or another there aren't enough bossy men to do all the bossing, then you find bossy women rising up. They get their chance. So there's this golden age so called of women in the fourteenth century after the Great Pestilence the Black Death, and you have this complete flowering of women's ownership of things, of them entering guilds, of them doing”
2024-10-01 · Intelligence Squared · Philippa Gregory and Tracy Chevalier on Weaving the Story into Historical Fiction, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think two things I'd really like to say one is that there is this historians call it the golden age of women, and it comes immediately after the plague, where I think rather blessedly an awful lot of And therefore there were vacant farms and there were vacant businesses and there were opportunities for women in a way that were”
2024-10-01 · Intelligence Squared · Philippa Gregory and Tracy Chevalier on Weaving the Story into Historical Fiction, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No interest in it whatsoever, because they knew that only a man could inherit Estaton it would be a disaster if a woman did. So there's a completely, it depends on who you are, what period of time you are, depends on the story that you want to tell”
2024-10-01 · Intelligence Squared · Philippa Gregory and Tracy Chevalier on Weaving the Story into Historical Fiction, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do talk about as someone who is very describes self in a very fluid gender way. Now that's of interest to us now, of course, powerful interest to us now. It wasn't that interesting to people at the time because they assumed that gender fluidity was perfectly natural and normal and could happen to anybody at any time, and actually there's an Elizabethan legal expert who describes what has to happen if someone who he calls a hermaphrodite chooses to become a man, then he can inherit the estate. If he then becomes a woman, he can't have the estate anymore. So there's a real drive to determine the gender of somebody, but the acceptance that they might change. So for instance, I mean that's in the history, but not everybody would be interested in it. The Victorians were.”
2024-10-01 · Intelligence Squared · Philippa Gregory and Tracy Chevalier on Weaving the Story into Historical Fiction, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know she could make a necklace for Josephine to see if that might seduce her a bit into going, off the glass here is so wonderful we must let them be independent. And so that's how it happens. I do the research. I know Josephine's there. I know what she does when she's there, but I insert my character into the narrative to see how she could play her part. And the real people are almost like cameos, aren't they? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because I do so much on real people, I have the same sense of responsibility that I can't be unfair to them. So although I take, it's my book, I'm the author.”
2024-10-01 · Intelligence Squared · Philippa Gregory and Tracy Chevalier on Weaving the Story into Historical Fiction, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bohemian in the early twentieth century shows up. Just make brief appearances, but I tried to get them as accurate as I could. Josephine really did come to Venice in 1797 after Napoleon conquered it. He sent her there really to see if Venice was worth keeping. What should he do with it? And so what I do is I take that fact and I think, okay, how can Orsula Maybe Ursula could make a necklace for her? How about that? What would happen if she becomes part of the Venetian entertainment? Lots of Venetians they took her to the opera, they had her go up and down the Grand Canal and lots of dinners and stuff to wine and dine her to make her fall in love with Venice. And I thought, well, how can I involve Ursula makes beads? She makes necklaces.”
2024-10-01 · Intelligence Squared · Philippa Gregory and Tracy Chevalier on Weaving the Story into Historical Fiction, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Maria Borovier, the bead maker, Casanova plays a little part, and Josephine, Napoleon's wife, shows up, and a countess, a Marquesa, Casati, Louisa Casati, who's very”
2024-10-01 · Intelligence Squared · Philippa Gregory and Tracy Chevalier on Weaving the Story into Historical Fiction, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't age at the same rate as the rest of the world, so Ursula is nine years old in fourteen eighty six, beginning of the book, and she's in her late sixties in twenty twenty two, and that she doesn't die'cause I didn't want her to. So the sections, it skips over a hundred years here, 75 years there, and they just age because it's Venice. So Venice is a timeless place. And I felt that if I could do it anywhere, it could be Venice. And they kind of know that on Terra Ferma on the mainland its time is going by, but they don't care. They don't care. So I get Ursula to do this. And now I realize my train of thought again. Oh no. Oh, what is happening? We're all hanging on to every happy bird. It was about fact and fiction. Yeah, there are real people make their way.”
2024-10-01 · Intelligence Squared · Philippa Gregory and Tracy Chevalier on Weaving the Story into Historical Fiction, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where there's lots of gaps to fill in, and you can speculate, and that's where the fun lies is taking the facts and the fiction and weaving them together in a way that people can't tell the difference. And where does the fiction take over? Or is that an impossible question to answer? Is that in the characters, that's in the imagined characters, how they would react to a historical situation? Yes, and in fact, in the glassmaker, so it takes place, I should explain the, it takes place over 500 years, but the family it follows”
2024-10-01 · Intelligence Squared · Philippa Gregory and Tracy Chevalier on Weaving the Story into Historical Fiction, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“scope of the book is after the time of the book and I really wanted her to visit London to go to this particular meeting but I could not let her I knew I couldn't you just can't do it you know it has to be accurate and I know what I was going to say I was a reference book editor before I was a novelist and the thing about reference books is that reference books are created by using past reference books information and then updating and I was hideously aware that if I made a mistake it was going to be replicated on down the line and you must feel similarly especially if students are going to read it it has to be right and I think I've extended that rigorous research and trying to be as accurate as possible to novels because I want them to be right if I can I mean but I choose subjects”
2024-10-01 · Intelligence Squared · Philippa Gregory and Tracy Chevalier on Weaving the Story into Historical Fiction, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no ordinary reader uses footnotes at all, but what's I think genuinely valuable about it for the general reader is there's a massive bibliography at the back of it. So if there's anything that catches your fancy or a century that you're interested in or a character that you're interested in, you can see where I got the original material and go and read that. Excellent, Tracy, you wanted to come in, I think Yes, and I've completely gone right away ahead. I'm so sorry. Never mind. It'll come to me. I bet it was the obligation, if you're rescuing people from the shadows, to tell their story accurately. Yes, I agree with that. I can't, if I know something has happened, so I wrote a novel called Remarkable Creatures about Marianning, a fossil hunter, and she only visited London once for five days, and it was after the”
2024-10-01 · Intelligence Squared · Philippa Gregory and Tracy Chevalier on Weaving the Story into Historical Fiction, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Philippa First of all, normal women why? I've done a children's edition of this is going to go in schools. This isn't any old I mean God forgive me for who would say this isn't a fiction that you can say well it's a fiction this is something that I am presenting to young people and older people as the history the untold history of women who otherwise their stories would not be told at all I can't bear to have anything in it which isn't accurate because you're not doing anybody much of a service if you pull them out of the shadows of history where they've never been mentioned at all and then get it wrong. That would be to me a betrayal of everything I'm trying to do it's been terribly important. So the whole thing is footnoted which my assistant pointed out at the time footnotes are just for scholars to pick on each other.”
2024-10-01 · Intelligence Squared · Philippa Gregory and Tracy Chevalier on Weaving the Story into Historical Fiction, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT