Era of their ways

The queen of historical fiction turns her gaze on the largely ignored lives of ordinary women.

- JENNY NICHOLLS

Hilary Mantel called her a "great fictionalising machine". For more than 30 years, the historical novelist Philippa Gregory has puréed real lives into romantic fiction frequently set in the royal courts of the 15th and 16th century. With titles like The Other Boleyn Girl, The White Queen, The Red Queen, Three Sisters, The Queen's Fool and The Other Queen, Gregory's crowning by media as "the queen of British historical fiction" seemed inevitable, even though historians do dispute her accuracy.

Gregory's fans might argue that romantic history doesn't have to be accurate - just escapist.

But now the queen is taking a break from queens, and fiction too, taking on the historians with an ambitious non-fiction work covering 900 years of ordinary English women's lives.

The title, a nod to Sally Rooney's Normal People, seems awkward, bluntly informative rather than ironic, although Gregory's women are anything but "normal". This is because, for centuries, the only traces most women left behind them were in legal documents. Births, deaths, marriages and court cases, some of them arrestingly lurid.