Normal Women

The Sunday Times Bestseller - 900 Years of Women Making History

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

_'A lasting work of social history' THE TIMES

'A genuinely new history of our nation' DAN JONES

'This celebration of women is a triumph of popular history' SPECTATOR

One of our foremost historical novelists, Philippa Gregory, makes history. We have fallen into the belief that women were absent from great events, and ineffectual in normal times. Through a radical reframing of the conventional eras of our history, Normal Women will tell the story of our nation - not with the rise and fall of Kings and the occasional Queen - but through social and cultural transition, showing the agency, persistence and effectiveness of women in society. Through the stories of the soldiers, guild widows, highwaywomen, pirates, miners and ship owners, international traders, theatre runners and ''female husbands'' Normal Women will redefine ''normal'' female behaviour to include heroism, rebellion, crime, treason, money-making, jousting and sainthood. And much rioting. Philippa Gregory has been working on this book for over ten years. It is the work of a lifetime from one of our greatest historical storytellers.

Autorentext

Philippa Gregory is an internationally renowned author of historical novels. She holds a PhD in eighteenth-century literature from the University of Edinburgh. Works that have been adapted for television include A Respectable Trade, The Other Boleyn Girl and The Queen's Fool. The Other Boleyn Girl is now a major film, starring Scarlett Johansson, Natalie Portman and Eric Bana. Philippa Gregory lives in the North of England with her family.

Klappentext

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

'A lasting work of social history' THE TIMES

'A genuinely new history of our nation' DAN JONES

'This celebration of women is a triumph of popular history' SPECTATOR

FROM THE MULTI-MILLION BESTSELLING HISTORICAL NOVELIST COMES THE CULMINATION OF HER LIFE'S WORK

• Did you know that there are more penises than women in the Bayeux Tapestry?
• That the Peasant's Revolt was started and propelled by women, protesting a tax on women?
• Or that celebrated naturalist Charles Darwin believed not just that women were naturally inferior to men but that they'd evolve to become ever more inferior? These are just a few of the startling findings you will learn from reading Philippa Gregory's Normal Women. In this ambitious and ground-breaking book, she tells the story of our nation over 900 years, but for the very first time women - some fifty per cent of the population - are no longer invisible in this history of England, but are at its beating heart.

Using research skills honed in her work as one of our foremost historical novelists, Gregory trawled through court records to find highway women, beggars and shepherdesses, through newspapers and diaries to find murderers and brides, housewives and pirates, female husbands and hermits. The 'normal women' you will meet in her pages went to war, ploughed the fields, campaigned, wrote, and loved. They rode in jousts, flew Spitfires, issued their own currency and built ships, corn mills and houses as part of their everyday lives They committed crimes, or treason, worshipped many gods, cooked and nursed, invented things and rioted. A lot. They built our society to be as diverse and varied as the women themselves. They are there in the archives - if you look - and they made our history.

'You'll lose count of the number of things you learn about women and their skewed place in history as you read Philippa Gregory's stunning Normal Women... the book reframes the past ... an essential read' INDEPENDENT, FIVE-STAR REVIEW

Zusammenfassung
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER?'A lasting work of social history' THE TIMES'A genuinely new history of our nation' DAN JONES'This celebration of women is a triumph of popular history' SPECTATOR