Philippa Gregory is a British, CBE (born January 9, 1954 in Kenya) is a British Historical Fiction writer.
She has written about a range of periods in British history, but is best known for her Tudor Court novels - mostly The Other Boleyn Girl, the success of which led to two film adaptations, a resurgent interest in the Tudors, and a flood of Follow the Leader novels about women of the period. She's also well-known for writing the bestselling Cousins' War series, which follows the fortunes of various important women in the preceding historical period, the Wars of the Roses.
Gregory is widely regarded as a decent historian who does her research thoroughly, but her books do frequently diverge from fact, most famously in The Other Boleyn Girl's depiction of Mary Boleyn as a naïve ingénue seduced by the king, when in reality she was not only married but had previously spent some time as the mistress of the King of France. She has, however, eschewed the Dan Brown route, being careful not to claim that her books are totally accurate and open about the fact that she is a fiction writer who will often make things up. That said, it is very important to remember that though Gregory may use the term "historian" to describe herself, her PhD is in Eighteenth Century Literature, not history. She's not exactly the type of person you should cite in a history paper.
Literary Series by Gregory
- Wideacre trilogy
- Wideacre (1987)
- The Favoured Child (1989)
- Meridon (1990)
- Mrs Hartley and the Growth Centre (1992): also published as Alice Hartley's Happiness
- The Wise Woman (1992)
- Fallen Skies (1994)
- A Respectable Trade (1995)
- Perfectly Correct (1996)
- The Little House (1998)
- Tradescant duology
- Earthly Joys (1998)
- Virgin Earth (1999)
- Zelda's Cut (2000)
- The Plantagenet and Tudor novels (also known as the The Cousins' War Series and Tudor Court series; they've since been rebranded as part of one series due to the increasing overlap between the characters and historical events):note
- The Other Boleyn Girl (2001)
- The Queen's Fool (2003)
- The Virgin's Lover (2004)
- The Constant Princess (2005)
- The Boleyn Inheritance (2006)
- The Other Queen (2008)
- The White Queen (2009)
- The Red Queen (2010)
- The Lady of the Rivers (2011)
- The Kingmaker's Daughter (2012)
- The White Princess (2013)
- The King's Curse (2014)
- The Taming of the Queen (2015)
- Three Sisters, Three Queens (2016)
- The Last Tudor (2017)
- The Order of Darkness series
- Changeling (2012)
- Stormbringers (2013)
- Fools' Gold (2014)
- Dark Tracks (2018)
- Fairmile Series
- Tidelands (2019)
- Dark Tides (2020)
- Dawnlands (2022)
Adaptions of Gregory's works with pages on TV Tropes:
- The Other Boleyn Girl (2008)
- The White Queen (2013)
- The White Princess (2017)
- The Spanish Princess (2019 - 2020)
Tropes found in and associated with Gregory works:
- Author Usurpation: For many years, she was known mostly for writing The Other Boleyn Girl and the rest of the Tudor Court series, though especially The Other Boleyn Girl. Gregory had actually written a dozen novels before The Other Boleyn Girl that were quite successful (A Respectable Trade even got a film adaptation in 1998), but her Tudor novels overshadowed them for much of the 2000s, to the point that reprintings of her older works came with "From the author of The Other Boleyn Girl" stamped on the covers. She finally managed to move past this in the 2010s to a degree, becoming better known for the Cousins' War series. These days, Gregory is strongly associated with both her Tudor novels and her Wars of the Roses novels. It probably helps that they've been merged into a single series, containing fifteen books in total.
- She Also Did: Gregory is primarily known for writing historical fiction, though she has written a few contemporary novels: Perfectly Correct, Zelda's Cut, Mrs Hartley and the Growth Centre and The Little House (which was adapted into a miniseries in 2010).
