If you haven’t gathered by my Book Riot posting history, I’m not what you would call a literary snob. I read widely and don’t believe in the concept of guilty pleasures when it comes to reading. If it gives me pleasure, there is no guilt. (This life philosophy also applies to TV shows and nail polish.) So it’s not because of snobbery that I don’t typically read a lot of popular women-targeted historical fiction. You know the genre: there’s a lot of bodice-ripping and sighing and royal impostors and courtly sleeping around and so forth. For whatever reason, this is not a place I go for my pleasure reading, though I know it’s an exceedingly popular genre. Every time I try to read a work in this area, though, I’m bored. I tend to privilege Canadian and literary writers when it comes to historical fiction (Michael Crummey and Lawrence Hill, let’s hang!), and my interest in bestsellers that are aggressively marketed to women is non-existent on principle. However. Every rule has an exception.
Enter Philippa Gregory. She has a PhD in English. She wrote The Other Boelyn Girl. I want to marry her and live in an awesome castle where she tells me half-true stories of British royalty for the rest of my days. Indeed, even this exception has an exception: I only like her royal books. Her Tudor series and her War of the Roses series. I’m aware that she writes other books; I’ve tried reading them but they don’t capture my interest. This makes my genre kryptonite very very specific: I like Philippa Gregory’s Royal Novels. And I like them as much or more than any other books I come across. People who don’t like Philippa Gregory’s novels spend an awful lot of time and energy explaining to me how historically inaccurate her novels are, which it turns out I don’t care about even a little bit, as I am not using these novels to inform my total sense of British royal history. (Next you’re going to tell me that Community isn’t an accurate representation of life in a community college. No you won’t, because it’s exactly like life in a community college. I’m basically Professor P. Professorson. Wait, where was I?) In preparation for this post, I thought a lot about what I do like about Philippa Gregory, since the historical nuances don’t really phase me — fiction is fiction, bro. Here’s what I came up with:
