Normal Women
900 Years of Making History
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3.3 • 3 Ratings
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
A NEW STATESMEN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023
‘A lasting work of social history’ THE TIMES
‘A genuinely new history of our nation’ DAN JONES
‘This celebration of women is a triumph of popular history’ SPECTATOR
FROM THE MULTI-MILLION BESTSELLING HISTORICAL NOVELIST COMES THE CULMINATION OF HER LIFE’S WORK
Did you know that there are more penises than women in the Bayeux Tapestry?That the Peasant’s Revolt was started and propelled by women, protesting a tax on women?Or that celebrated naturalist Charles Darwin believed not just that women were naturally inferior to men but that they’d evolve to become ever more inferior?
These are just a few of the startling findings you will learn from reading Philippa Gregory’s Normal Women. In this ambitious and ground-breaking book, she tells the story of our nation over 900 years, but for the very first time women – some fifty per cent of the population – are no longer invisible in this history of England, but are at its beating heart.
Using research skills honed in her work as one of our foremost historical novelists, Gregory trawled through court records to find highway women, beggars and shepherdesses, through newspapers and diaries to find murderers and brides, housewives and pirates, female husbands and hermits. The ‘normal women’ you will meet in her pages went to war, ploughed the fields, campaigned, wrote, and loved. They rode in jousts, flew Spitfires, issued their own currency and built ships, corn mills and houses as part of their everyday lives They committed crimes, or treason, worshipped many gods, cooked and nursed, invented things and rioted. A lot. They built our society to be as diverse and varied as the women themselves. They are there in the archives – if you look – and they made our history.
‘You’ll lose count of the number of things you learn about women and their skewed place in history as you read Philippa Gregory’s stunning Normal Women … the book reframes the past … an essential read’ INDEPENDENT, FIVE-STAR REVIEW
About the author
Philippa Gregory is an internationally renowned author of historical novels. She holds a PhD in eighteenth-century literature from the University of Edinburgh. Works that have been adapted for television include A Respectable Trade, The Other Boleyn Girl and The Queen's Fool. The Other Boleyn Girl is now a major film, starring Scarlett Johansson, Natalie Portman and Eric Bana. Philippa Gregory lives in the North of England with her family.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Kicking off in 1066, Philippa Gregory’s expansive vision of the lives of ordinary women in England is crammed full of rich, absorbing detail on every single page. No dry reference tome, it’s full of passion, and fury, and the odd sarcastic aside—usually at the expense of the many, many men who used every available tool to squeeze women out of full participation in their own lives. Her themes are clear: the intentional, inexorable denigration of women’s work, the stifling of their vitality, their creativity and their sexuality, and the sheer violence committed at all levels of society. Equally importantly, and with plenty of evidence, Gregory reminds us that working class and immigrant women have consistently borne the brunt of misogyny’s worst excesses. But the anger and frustration is matched by sheer admiration for the women—midwives, moneylenders, radicals, reformists, nuns, thieves and rioters—who Gregory insists are finally given their due. It’s a book to take your time over, to bask in, and one to come back to.
