Tidelands

Philippa Gregory's Inside Story: “This is a very conscious departure for me. I really love working on the sort of fictional biographies of important Tudor and Plantagenet women, but I realised that what I wanted to do was to work more on recording the history of ordinary people, normal people. Not the privileged elite. But still women. Still looking at the obstacles to women's agency. Still looking at women in a very accurately observed historical background. To step a little bit more towards fiction by creating a fictional character was very, very freeing and very, very exciting.

“When you're writing about the court, you're very often indoors, whereas here, you're talking about people who lived, not in a state of nature, but who lived very, very close to nature and very close to the material world. So the landscape and the weather is so much more important than it is for people who have adequate shelter and who spend, to us, no time at all, but to them a good part of the day, a third of the day, say, indoors.

“It's also an environment that I know very well and I love very deeply. When I was a young journalist, I worked on the Chichester Observer and I lived in Selsey. It was lovely to revisit, but taking off all the normal trappings of modern life. I'm trying to ask, ‘What would it be like if there were no cars? What would it be like if it was silent? What would it be like if there was no air pollution, if there was no light pollution?’ It's very exciting to look at a well-known landscape and translate the modern world from it.

“Alinor is a woman who is absolutely between all the worlds you can think of. She's not political—she's not really a Cromwellian, she's not a really a Cavalier. She, like so many people, really didn't know what the right thing was to do or choose. She's not a wife because she's been deserted, but at the same time, she's not a single woman, so she has difficulties at that status. She's a midwife, but she hasn't got a license because of the breakdown of admin during the civil war. And she's a herbalist. She's literally walking between two worlds—that of old witchcraft skills and the new science, which is coming in. There's no way that she's anything but marginal. And she lives in this landscape which really symbolises the marginality of sea and land. I put her there because I wanted to think about someone who came from very primitive conditions and was, as it were, muddy. I imagined her in that landscape because I wanted a serious start with a very poor family in very indeterminate, innocent, unhistorical, almost timeless poverty and muddiness. And then I realised that it was such a wonderful image for everything else about her life that she's never quite fish or fowl. She's always trying to live a life between the two.

“I was really focusing on the 17th century in my research for a non-fiction history book about the life of women in England during the time I was writing Tidelands. I knew that would give me really everything I needed to know about a typical poor woman's life in the 17th century. There is material, but it’s very specialist. You don't come across it in the standard history books, but very great scholars have done a lot of work on going into the archives to find out what women were doing during this time. And of course, what you end up with is mostly crime because that's what's recorded. But if you read the records of them, they tell you an awful lot about ordinary lives of people around them. So, the witnesses say what they were doing on the day when they saw the crime took place. There's a very rich archive, but not very much examined about ordinary women's lives, ordinary men and women's lives in the also less examined countryside and agricultural England at that time.

"I was perfectly happy with the research I was doing with that. I could see that what I could weave her story through what I knew about what was happening for most people. I then realised that she was there very clearly located for me in Chichester Harbour. Charles I was arrested and imprisoned in the Isle of Wight, and I thought, ‘Oh, there you go again. There's your big picture history. There's your big historical event.’ And then I realised, ‘This is just fabulous. This is exactly the sort of thing I like to write, which is very accurately observed history of ordinary people, with the collision, which does happen in ordinary lives of the big historical event, which sometimes just happens to be on your doorstep.’

“So, Alinor is really affected by that, but at no point does she actually encounter the king. I didn't jump the shark. I didn't want her to be the exceptional woman who steps out of the crowd and meets the king. I wanted her to be a typical woman who lived only a few miles from him at one point, but heard of battles weeks after they had happened and never really knew which was right side to be on.

“If you read anything about women in the 17th century, on one hand you see a surprising number of women running their own businesses, traveling, being entrepreneurial in the wool business, in the pawnshop business, in lending capital, building—almost every trade. There were women in the brick trade. There were women in ship building. The extent of women's involvement and their capital investment and the wealth that they command in that period really was quite unbelievable. But at the same time, it is a period when women are suffering a pushback and where it is still legal for a man to beat his wife, as long as he doesn't use undue force. So, you go on the one hand, there are women who have rights of little more than domestic animals. They also can be punished by the society for speaking out. They can be punished if they are regarded as being too clever for their own good. And this at a time just after there's been a queen on the throne. It's the contrast between the authority that some women manage to get and society's belief as to what a woman should be allowed to do that interested me. It's very jarring.

"In terms of writing at this stage of my career, I approach the material with more research, and probably more delicacy. I really love technique now, and I really love being conscious of writing… writing well isn't quite what I mean. But I'm really conscious of building a big effect by lots and lots and lots of tiny little layers as opposed to just chucking the paint at the well and saying, ‘Wow, look at that.’ It's a really different feeling in writing, and at the end of it, what I want to get is something which is very shocking and is very startling to people who don't see the ending coming like that. But when they then think about it, they'll see that there's been a million pointers and realise that was the only way that it was going to end up.

“Every day in the writing, there are lots of little pleasures. Sometimes being delighted with the turn of phrase or nailing a description or realising that something fits in there, or sometimes getting to a conclusion and then going, ‘Right, we're back to beginning,’ and seeing it through so that it makes absolute sense.

“But the best moment is when the story takes off in an unexpected direction, which I can do when I'm writing not a fictional biography because then the story's determined for me in a way. When I'm absolutely free to do what I want it's just wonderful. I'm writing book two of the series at the moment and I recently had a carriage draw up at my new heroine's door. From her point of view at the window, a black silk shod foot gets out, and I thought to myselft, ‘Who's that? Who's that that just walked into my novel?’ I couldn't wait to find out. I really had no idea. Then I work some more and say, ‘Oh, it's you. Well, I knew you were going to come in, but I didn't think you were going to come in now, but here you are.’ It's still the most fun thing. I have a very, very, very nice life with a lot of very deep and worthwhile pleasures in it, but writing fiction is up there with probably anything.”