In The Rising Podcast- A Health and Wellness Podcast

Author Philippa Gregory onThe Art of Being, Importance of Sisterhood, and Loving What You Do

November 08, 2022 Bettina M Brown/ Philippa Gregory Season 2 Episode 168
In The Rising Podcast- A Health and Wellness Podcast
Author Philippa Gregory onThe Art of Being, Importance of Sisterhood, and Loving What You Do
Show Notes Transcript

In this episode of "The Rising Podcast," host Bettina M Brown interviews renowned author Philippa Gregory. Together, they delve into a fascinating conversation about the art of being, the importance of sisterhood, and the love for what you do. Philippa Gregory, known for her incredible works such as "The Other Boleyn Girl" (which was even adapted into a movie starring Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson), shares her personal journey and insights as a historian and writer.

As the interview progresses, Bettina expresses her admiration for Philippa and her books, having been a fan for over 20 years. They discuss the beginnings of Philippa's writing career, particularly the decision to write and publish her first book while pursuing a PhD. Philippa reflects on the dichotomy between writing and publishing, and how her academic background in 18th-century literature influenced her storytelling.

The conversation touches on the world that the elite 18th-century English people created for themselves, shedding light on the conflicting moral dilemmas they faced. Philippa dives into the complex issues of enclosure, poverty, and the forthcoming industrial revolution that had far-reaching consequences for the masses.

Join Bettina M Brown and Philippa Gregory in this insightful episode as they bring forth inspiring discussions on literature, history, and the profound experiences of being an author. Prepare to be captivated by Philippa's incredible journey and her unique perspectives.

This interview was organized by:
Peter Marchese
Playback Producers, LLC
www.playbackproducers.com
917-572-8291 






Thank you for your time and interest in this podcast! I invite you to leave a heartfelt review on whichever podcast platform you listen to. It does so much to bring exposure to the podcast and helps lift others up!

To leave a review, helping us spread the contents of this podcast- click on this link! Thank you!

Connect with me!

Website: In the Rising Podcast Website

Email: Bettina@intherising.com

In the Rising Pinterest:

In the Rising Facebook

Check out the Website: Fit after Breast Cancer


[00:00:00] Bettina M Brown: Hello, hello and welcome to In the rising podcast. My name is Bettina Brown and this is the platform I've chosen to talk about living a life. That's in alignment with your hopes, your dreams, and your goals, and turning your back on that shame blame game that does absolutely nothing for anyone at any time.

[00:00:27] Bettina M Brown: And I have really had an awesome time with my interviews. And today I got to interview a person whose books I've read for over 20 years. As I continued through the interview, I admired her even more. Her name is Philippa Gregory, and she is the author of books like The Other Boleyn Girl, which was produced into a movie and had Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson.

[00:00:54] Bettina M Brown: Really is just a phenomenal, phenomenal author. historian and I'm so excited for you to hear her story. Welcome. So, thank you so much for being on in the rising podcast. I'm really honored as a fan to speak to you today, but also really excited to speak to you as an author and someone who shows up with their writing.

[00:01:18] Bettina M Brown: So thank you for being here. Thank you.

[00:01:20] Philippa Gregory: It's a real pleasure to be with you. 

[00:01:22] Bettina M Brown: So I, I've read about you. I've read your books as well. But one of my first questions that, that I like to ask any author is, especially you, because my understanding is you were working on a PhD when you were writing that very first book, what, what gave you that nudge to just go ahead and write and publish?

[00:01:45] Philippa Gregory: It's such a different thing, writing from publishing. So, what gave me the nudge to write was that I had, I was writing my PhD. And so, for four years, I had been reading 18th century novels and thinking about The world that the 18th century created for themselves, which in a sense explained and justified the changes they were making in the real world.

[00:02:09] Philippa Gregory: So, the elite 18th century English people are really terrible people. They're enclosing, they're grinding the faces of the poor. They're about to invent the industrial revolution, which is going to cause starvation and death to thousands of people who were formerly their tenants. So how do you live with yourself?

[00:02:29] Philippa Gregory: And one of the ways they live with themselves is they invent this fantasy world about merry England. So, you get what ultimately becomes Victorian medievalism. So, you get this idea that England's really lovely, that it's completely unpolluted, that it's everybody's living in their villages and dancing around maypoles and everything's fine.

[00:02:48] Philippa Gregory: And that's the 18th century novel view of the countryside at the very time that the class of the 18th century readers are destroying the countryside. So that's what the thesis was partly about. And so, in order to understand that I read literally, literally, 200 18th century novels. And these are not little books.

[00:03:11] Philippa Gregory: These are triple deckers and eight volume things. So, it was a massive project. And what I didn't realize was by the time I'd finished That research, I have produced, in fact, an apprenticeship for myself in how to write a novel, and it was, I mean, transformative without knowing it. So, literally, I had read 200 novels at the very time that the novel form was being written.

[00:03:39] Philippa Gregory: So, when I wanted to write a novel, It, it just, I just naturally, I just wanted to write. I just couldn't stop myself writing about an 18th century elite woman who was enclosing the land, who was damaging the lives of the poor. And as I was writing it, I just knew that it was. Going well, because I've just been reading so many 18th century novels myself.

[00:04:03] Philippa Gregory: So in a sense, the PhD gave me both the research material and the craft in one go. And I didn't do it for that, but that's how it worked. That's 

[00:04:12] Bettina M Brown: how it came about. And I read a quote from you that says, I try to read so much. I know it until it becomes almost like a memory. And that is sounds exactly like what you just described.

[00:04:25] Philippa Gregory: Yeah, the great Faye Weldon once said to me, she said, it's not that you research these. Stories and remember them. It's that you read them so much that you actually embed them. They are your history now. And it's absolutely true. And one of the funny things, one of the funny consequences of that is that if you ask me about some of my characters, I feel.

[00:04:48] Philippa Gregory: And historical characters as well. I feel as fond of them as if you were asking me about members of my family that I get that familiar sort of, oh yes, you know, so Mary Boleyn's daughter, Catherine Carey entered my novel in one of my later books. And I was writing that she comes into the court of Elizabeth the first, and I just really felt like, oh yeah, I know you.

[00:05:12] Philippa Gregory: And I remember saying that I knew your mother really well.

[00:05:18] Bettina M Brown: Oh, wow. And, and so share, you know, you just have a new, new book coming out Dawnlands share how the characters are evolving and what, what gave you the idea to develop these characters 

[00:05:34] Philippa Gregory: well, interestingly, as you know, as your podcast, it's about rising. But what I wanted to do was I wanted to write a family saga, which doesn't start off with the family in a pinnacle of success as so many.

[00:05:47] Philippa Gregory: sagas do. I wanted to talk about how practically every family in England today comes not from aristocracy or certainly not from royals. Most of us come out of very, very hard, poor backgrounds because that's where the majority of people live in the historical period. So, I wanted a story about a woman who has virtually nothing and then loses that, and how she builds a life for herself and her family.

[00:06:19] Philippa Gregory: So the first novel is called Tidelands, and we're a very poor family on the Sussex shore in the south of England, and They get themselves one way or another to the bank of the Thames and a small warehouse and book two is them starting to run a business with a little bit of growth on the bank of the Thames and they start to become a little bit international.

[00:06:42] Philippa Gregory: And so they end up with. outpost trading in Venice, and a brother goes to New England and is in Connecticut at the time of the King Philip's War. And book three sees us with the brother coming home from New England because he knows that the Stuart king on the throne, James II, is going to face a rebellion because of his religious reforms.

[00:07:06] Philippa Gregory: He wants to turn the country back to Roman Catholic. And the Venice widow that we had in book two has made a has risen through society by complete ambition and sexual exploitation to become a lady of the court at the Queen of Mary of Medina. So, you've got this family itself divided either side of what becomes a very, very major English civil war.

[00:07:33] Bettina M Brown: The characters, you know, you can relate to that because when you have virtually nothing and there have been people, especially now, in the past few years with what's going on have sometimes lost that as well and or knowing people are feeling vulnerable to lose things makes you relate to people.

[00:07:53] Bettina M Brown: In that way, when you're writing your characters and developing them and getting to know them like friends and family, where do you come from with regards to your ideas? Like, do you pull from your own experiences? Do you pull from friends and family? Do you pull from the culture? 

[00:08:12] Philippa Gregory: It very much depends on the story.

[00:08:14] Philippa Gregory: I mean, I think. Everybody who writes a book has to acknowledge that they authored it. Of course, it comes out of my imagination and my memories and my experiences, but it also comes out of my research and my knowledge. So, you've got this kind of coalescence of information which comes from different sources.

[00:08:34] Philippa Gregory: I never consciously draw on anyone that I know and go like, I'll have you because you would see me, you know, that's not how I create. So it, that doesn't work at all. But for instance, in this novel, Dawnlands, there's a character who is from the Poconocot people, who are the aboriginal people on the east coast of America stretching really a lot of Massachusetts.

[00:09:00] Philippa Gregory: I mean, that's a big empire that they have and run. And I met with them and the tribal elders to ask them. if I might speak of their history. So first of all, it was very much a sort of a permission to research question. And then they were so generous with their time and so generous with their stories that I very much drew on that.

[00:09:22] Philippa Gregory: So that is drawing on an oral history from real people now. But then most of the work comes from Literally records and sometimes locations and geography and weather and library records. I mean, I just read a tremendous amount now. 

[00:09:40] Bettina M Brown: It sounds like you're a voracious reader. Like, have you is that in your family or is that something you just developed over time?

[00:09:48] Philippa Gregory: My family are. Readers, but they're not scholars. And that's just something that happened to me. And I was the first person in my family to go to university on one side, and the first woman to go to university on another side. So it's, you know, it's something I'm very proud of in terms of my family history, but it's also just a passion.

[00:10:11] Philippa Gregory: If everybody hated it, I'd have done it anyway. You know, I think if, If you're a reader, you've just got to read. 

[00:10:16] Bettina M Brown: You have to it's part of that. What do you feel, you know, when you're, you're, you know, you're well-loved and your, your books have been followed, published, multiple languages? There are famous actors that are now being the characters that you have developed and that came out of your research.

[00:10:36] Bettina M Brown: How do you feel, or what do you still feel like you have to rise up to? Is that like a side thing, or are you just so focused on the love of your craft, the passion of your craft, that you just... 

[00:10:48] Philippa Gregory: I have, I have things I want to do yet that I, that I would really dearly love to see. I, I have a play, which I really want to see in the theater, which would be completely wonderful and thrilling to see put on.

[00:11:03] Philippa Gregory: And I'm. in the middle of writing a nonfiction, a history of English women. And I am longing to see that published and to see the sort of reception it gets in the world. And it should come out next year. 

[00:11:18] Bettina M Brown: Wow. Wonderful. Wonderful. And I definitely get the theme. Of the importance of acknowledging women in history and women in general, what it sounds like that is also a passion point for you to speak about what do you feel we as women and when we have an audience, whether it's podcasting or books that we have an audience there, what do you feel is important to put out into the world regarding the importance of the contributions of women, 

[00:11:48] Philippa Gregory: Probably, I'd say two things.

[00:11:49] Philippa Gregory: One is that basically all of the history that you have. Most likely read is just half the history of the nation. So, I mean, I'm sitting behind me is my collection of books of women's history, just about women over that side of the room, twice the size, easily twice the size, actually four times the size is my collection of history books.

[00:12:16] Philippa Gregory: And that's. not proportionate at all. There are, for every book written about women history, there are probably a hundred books written about history, which calls itself the national history, but is actually the history of the men of the nation. So, I think we have to really understand that. Women's history is still a vacuum and that it, we're all, we can all contribute to it.

[00:12:39] Philippa Gregory: You know, even if you write your own history, even if you write your mother's history, that builds into a history of the nation, which is currently missing. And I suppose the other thing I really, really like to say is that one of the things that makes a difference between women of the very distant past, the medieval period and women of today is that there was a class division which occurs round about the industrial revolution.

[00:13:06] Philippa Gregory: And that's about breaking sisterhood. So, in the, the medieval lady in the manor felt more akin to the villager in her cottage than say the woman running the company does to the woman on the shop floor. And that's. A terrible, terrible thing that happened to us, literally happened to us, was literally done to us when people started to talk about ladies being special and women being ordinary.

[00:13:36] Philippa Gregory: And the fact that we bought into that is completely understandable, but it's disastrous, disastrous. And what we have to do is to restore sisterhood. And I think we'll do that by understanding our history. Yeah, 

[00:13:48] Bettina M Brown: and I like the way you talked about restoring sisterhood and understanding your history and paying attention to that.

[00:13:54] Bettina M Brown: So it's, it's the history of your family, but also your maternal lines, knowing what each one of them have gone through and Not even knowing my own grandmothers because they had passed before I was born, but to hear the stories of what they've gone through either in the United States or in Germany during certain times, it does give you a sense of pride of what you can overcome and what you've been through that this is your family line and they had it more difficult in some aspects.

[00:14:20] Bettina M Brown: So, get it together today and put it out there. 

[00:14:23] Philippa Gregory: Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, what you, one of the lessons I think that, that I come away from studying, particularly historic women, historic women characters from the past, is that what characterizes the people who survive and indeed those who win is just absolute Perseverance that you don't ever give up just you and a lot of them don't have a choice because if they gave up, they would be destroyed.

[00:14:49] Philippa Gregory: But even in the world today, you know, I think you have to maintain your energy and your commitment to your own happiness and to the happiness of your society. You have to. 

[00:15:02] Bettina M Brown: This has been such an honor to speak with you. I love the insight that you have and also your passion for bringing out as a woman.

[00:15:10] Bettina M Brown: And also to identify the people that did not have as much of a voice that you are now lending a voice to an interest to. So I'm so grateful. Share a little bit about your book where we can find them. I know we're on different sides of the pond of the Atlantic, but share, share a little bit about that.

[00:15:27] Philippa Gregory: Yeah, my book is called Dawnlands. It's the story, as I was saying, of Queen Mary of Medina and the family that serve her, and also the story of her husband and the, the family, the same family that oppose him. So it's a story set in 1685, and we're leading up to 1688, which is, in England, is known as the Glorious Rebellion, Revolution.

[00:15:51] Philippa Gregory: And you can get it in any bookshop. Anywhere. I hope if you can't get in any bookshop, let me know because you should be able to, and you can get it of course, online independent bookshops online as an ebook, as a Kindle book as an audible book also, it should be 

[00:16:08] Bettina M Brown: everywhere. So I had really a phenomenal 15 minutes with Philippa Gregory and it went by so quickly, but I enjoyed the wisdom that she brought.

[00:16:18] Bettina M Brown: I really enjoyed the fact that she was humble and shared. Her moniker of never giving up, but more importantly, I also realized that our stories, all of our stories are so important. We are all here because someone obviously came in front of us and we know our family tree to some extent, but there's so much we don't know.

[00:16:42] Bettina M Brown: But every single one of those individuals had to go over something, had to rise, had to survive something great and something big. And maybe on those harsh days where we think we're having a bad day, or a character building day, we can think back on that and realize that we are just one of a long line of people that have risen every day.

[00:17:03] Bettina M Brown: And it's also our responsibility, not only to our future generations, but also to ourselves and those around us to thrive and rise. And so I'm so grateful for your time today because it's that one resource we never get back. If you enjoyed this podcast, please share it. The more hands and ears that we put it in, the greater the difference.

[00:17:25] Bettina M Brown: And it's also my ask that if you enjoyed this podcast to leave a review, it does so much to further the span of this podcast. I thank you again for your time and until next time, let's keep building one another!