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

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.

A Groundbreaking History of England

In this ambitious and groundbreaking book, Philippa Gregory tells the story of our nation over 900 years. For the very first time, women – some fifty per cent of the population – are no longer invisible in the history of England, but are placed at its beating heart.

Using research skills honed in her work as one of our foremost historical novelists, Gregory delves into court records, newspapers, and diaries to uncover the lives of women who have shaped history.

The ‘normal women’ you will meet in her pages include:

• Highway women, beggars, and shepherdesses
• Murderers and brides
• Housewives and pirates
• Female husbands and hermits

These women went to war, ploughed fields, campaigned, wrote, and loved. They jousted, flew Spitfires, issued their own currency, and built ships, corn mills, and houses. They committed crimes, worshipped many gods, cooked, nursed, invented, and rioted – a lot.

The women in this book built our society to be as diverse and varied as they were. 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

Philippa Gregory's Normal Women was a No.2 Sunday Times bestseller w/c 2024-09-30.