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
