Normal Women: Nine Hundred Years of Making History

Lively, timely and gloriously energetic. Each page bursts with life, and every chapter swirls with personalities left out of traditional narratives of Britains past. Philippa Gregory has produced something rare and wonderful: a genuinely new history of [Britain], with women at its beating heart. Dan Jones, New York Times bestselling author of The PlantagenetsYouve devoured her novels, but now Gregory shows off chops as a historian. . . . An amazing read. The Los Angeles TimesThe #1 New York Times bestselling historical novelist delivers her magnum opusa landmark work of feminist nonfiction that radically redefines our understanding of the extraordinary roles ordinary women played throughout British history.AN INDIE BESTSELLERDid you know that there are more penises than women in the Bayeux Tapestry? That the Peasants Revolt of 1381 was started and propelled by women who were protesting a tax on women? Or that celebrated naturalist Charles Darwin believed not just that women were naturally inferior to men, but that theyd evolve to become ever more inferior?These are just a few of the startling findings you will learn from reading Philippa Gregorys Normal Women. In this ambitious and groundbreaking book, she tells the story of England over 900 years, for the very first time placing womensome fifty per cent of the populationcenter stage.Using research skills honed in her work as one of our foremost historical novelists, Gregory trawled through court records, newspapers, and journals to find highwaywomen and beggars, murderers and brides, housewives and pirates, female husbands and hermits. The normal women you will meet in these 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. They committed crimes or treason, worshipped many gods, cooked and nursed, invented things, and rioted. A lot.A landmark work of scholarship and storytelling, Normal Women chronicles centuries of social and cultural changefrom 1066 to modern timespowered by the determination, persistence, and effectiveness of women.*INCLUDES ILLUSTRATIONS THROUGHOUT AND A FULLCOLOR INSERT*An expansive, inclusive and elegantly woven nonfiction account of the lives of women in England from the Norman Conquest to the modern day. To describe it as merely a retelling is to undermine a core principle: This is a history of women in England, yes, but it is also a history of England, full stop. . . . At more than 500 pages, with extensive endnotes and a 30page index, Normal Women is a behemoth you may be inclined to skim, until you realize youre actually luxuriating in every word. The New York Times