The Wise Woman: A Novel

"This was Philippa Gregory’s debut. I’m a huge fan of the enormous variety of Philippa’s writing. With all my fiction and nonfiction, my interest is putting ordinary women back into history. So court stories appeal less, because they are the women we know, and most of us are not those women. The Wise Woman brings the ordinary world of the Tudor period to life, away from the finest houses and the court. And it’s a story, a feminist parable really, about a woman struggling to protect herself and to find a way to live without terrible consequences in a pitiless world. She is subject to ‘big history.’ Most of us, whatever we feel, have little power in the face of the big history going on around us. It is a mystery to me as to why Henry VIII—a serial adulterer, an abuser, a bully, a wrecker—has become this iconic figure. He was a 16th century Trumpian figure, it’s quite extraordinary. But this story is about an ordinary girl who understands that being in a nunnery will keep her safer than being a lone woman out in the world. And so it does, until the Dissolution of the Monasteries, when everyone is evicted and she loses her sanctuary. Then she uses her powers—a form of magic—to achieve a way of living in the world. But this puts her in danger, because of course she is seen as a heretic. It is a gripping read. Well, I think a lot of the time what is being presented as, or what would have been thought of as magic, is simply knowledge that is not part of the proscribed text. Women’s knowledge as opposed to the knowledge of the church. A century later we would be in the time of mass murdering of women under the guise of witchcraft trials. This was a time where women were not allowed to be doctors—the Royal College of Surgeons talked of women as ‘mentally feeble’. But we know that women had been healers; once it became a profession, women weren’t allowed to do it. I think, yes, there is an idea, possibly, that magic gives women a power that they lacked in the real world. But when you actually look into these powers, a lot of them are just gifts and skills that, nowadays, would be categorised as scientific invention. Some people have an intuition and knowledge that leads them down a particular track, and others do not. Yet again it comes back to that idea of women’s lives not being recorded, and when it is, it’s always the story of the one extraordinary woman who essentially was different from all other women. That’s the other important thing about putting women back into history: not to fall into that trap. Behind that one extraordinary woman, there will always be many others doing much the same thing but not being acknowledged. That’s why I love the lead character in The Wise Woman , because she is both exceptional and also an ordinary woman trying to find a way to survive in a world that is very harsh to women."