Philippa Gregory's Favorite Fictional Heroines

For all my adult life, I have been thinking about the lives of women in history: how they are portrayed and how few books take seriously the particular difficulties women face in expressing themselves, in growing and learning, and in being successful in what was—at the time history was first written—wholly a man’s world.

When I write about a woman in history—whether real or, as in my new novel, a fictional character—they are always women who are up against tremendous odds and some of them are overwhelmed.

My latest heroine, Alinor, is trying to lead a steady life in shifting circumstances. She is married but has no support from her husband. She lives in a place where land turns into sea, at a time when women were increasingly demonized. She is a midwife at a time when female healers were being pushed out of an increasingly male profession. She works with herbs, an expertise that was simultaneously dying out and coming under fire for its possible connection to witchcraft.

In everything she does, she has to walk a very narrow line. I think a lot of women recognize that feeling, even today.

Without real intention, I came to describe a marginal life on the coast—at the end of solid land. I think this is an intuitive truth: Any novel about a historical woman is going to be about a woman on the edge of events, perilously close to defeat but—wow—what defeats!

These, my favorite heroines, are women who fight to the end and who realize, and show us, that their cause is worth the struggle. They often betray themselves by loving too much or loving the wrong man, and this is part of the imaginary conflict between head and heart that women struggle with. I don’t think it is our struggle. I think women find themselves engaged in this struggle between thinking and feeling because the world—the man’s world—has decided to value logic over intuition, intention over desire, thoughts over feelings.

In this world, it is a struggle in itself to be emotionally intelligent—as Germaine Greer said, to be intelligently passionate and passionately intelligent.