The ending of Dark Tides mirrors that of Tidelands. Then, Alinor and Alys were driven from their home and setting out on a journey to a new life; now, Ned leaves his home in search of “unclaimed unused lands, where he could live without choosing sides, where he could be himself: neither master nor man.” Why do you think the author chooses to end the story in this way?
Enhance Your Book Club
Get out a map and identify the places where this story takes place. Does anything strike you about the physical distance between these locations, especially given the time period during which the story takes place?
Visit a museum with Greek and Roman art galleries or the Metropolitan Museum of Art website at https://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-met/curatorial-departments/greek-and-roman-art to view the kinds of antiquities Livia and Felipe might have exported. Which are you most drawn to?
Has anyone in your book group read other novels by Philippa Gregory, either Tidelands or her previous books? How does this book compare?
Visit the author’s website at PhilippaGregory.com to learn more about her work and the Fairmile series.
A Conversation with Philippa Gregory
Dark Tides is the second book in a planned series about the fictional Reekie family, spanning generations and continents. What drew you to writing an ambitious family saga at this point in your career?
It’s been a long career and deeply enjoyable! And I have learned the confidence to embark on a long project like this, certain that there will be extraordinary, little-known stories that will turn up in research that I can incorporate into the story of the family’s rise to prosperity and the greater story of the changes in England and in the world. I know a little of my family history, and many other individual and small histories, and I want to go from the personal to the global with an international long-term story. I’ve always disliked the snobbery of much of traditional historical fiction when it focuses on the well-known and grand people, so this is a challenge to that style. And in addition to all of that, I was rereading The Forsyte Saga and was inspired by the journey Soames—a wealthy Victorian Londoner—makes to what he regards are his roots: some muddy fields. Go back far enough, and all our families come from muddy fields; I wanted to celebrate that.
Although you’re best known for your work in royal historical fiction, you’ve spoken about working on a history of what we consider “ordinary” women, who have been overlooked and invisible throughout much of history. How does this nonfiction work influence and inform your fiction and vice versa?
My interest has always been in women in history; it was the obscure women and not the famous men that have always interested me. So it was a logical development that I should want to write a history of women who rarely make any mark in the records. I have been working for some years now on a history of women of England and this is my major work, but it is inspiring and supporting my fictional writing. As always, what really happened is so much more dramatic, extreme, and unlikely than anything I would dare to invent.
The first book in this series, Tidelands, was set in the marshlands of Sussex, where you lived for a time. This novel takes place between London, Venice, and the land that became Connecticut. What drew you to these settings?
Pagham Harbour, the setting of Tidelands, was the destination of many childhood visits, and I lived beside it for five years, sharing a house with the warden and sometimes helping him with his conservation work, so it was a powerful place for me to invoke in my first novel of this series. London is the center of the development of global western trade at this time, a natural destination for disgraced women who might hope to make a living obscured by the crowds, and a wonderful starting point for a story about a trading family. Venice was a famous trading city, especially in luxury goods and the objects that drove the Renaissance: classical artifacts. I’ve visited the city many times and I love the urban architecture and history, but for this novel I also went to the Isola del Lazzaretto Nuovo. I was honored to have a tour by the curator and was able to walk around the waterside path outside the boundary walls of the old quarantine castle. It was so striking to see the wildness of the Venice lagoon, the mud banks, the reed banks, and the bird life. At once I realized that Rob would see the similarity to his home, and would be as sure-footed here as on the Saxon shore. It was the landscape which inspired the escape, a part of the story I particularly like, as it came to me so vividly. I visited New England also, meeting historians and people of the Pokanoket and Pequot nations. Here too the landscape was hugely inspiring, and I could trace the settlement of Hadley on the bend in the river, and try to imagine the people who lived there, for so many centuries before the coming of the settlers.
You write beautifully about the natural world. The space particularly between land and sea holds such significance for your characters. How does your experience of nature and landscape influence your writing?
I think the truth is more that nature and landscape influence me very deeply as a person, and comes out in everything I do. I even have very vivid and detailed dream landscapes! I have lived for most of my adult life in the country, and one of my greatest pleasures is being out in the countryside. I have a sense of peace and belonging in a rural landscape, and I feel at home in woods and fields in a way that I never do in towns. I like to be connected to the animal world—I care for two ancient ponies that were my children’s ponies, and I have a dog and sometimes raise abandoned ducklings. I feed and house a rescued barn owl who flies freely out of my barn, and has lived as my neighbor (by his own free choice) for twelve years, bringing a female back every year and raising chicks. Earlier generations who lived off the land were far closer to the natural world than we are now, and I try to reflect this in my characters’ love of their home landscape, and their knowledge about the natural world. I am in awe of the historic American Indians’ integration with their world: they felt a kinship with the animal and natural world which was incorporated into every aspect of their lives.
A tremendous amount of research went into this novel—there’s such authority and ease to your voice when explaining both the process of art forgery and the relationship between settlers and American Indian nations in the New World. How did you go about researching this novel? Did anything surprise you during the research process?
As always, my research was a great deal of reading and some visits. My biggest early surprise was the extent of art and historic artifacts forgery, even today. The Lustrous Trade and the other books about art forgery listed in the bibliography were real eye-openers! I had no idea of the extent of grave looting and forgery which continues even today. Other fascinating snippets were the early international trading companies of London—Johnnie did not long to be a member of the Company any more than I longed for him to join them! I learned about the value of herbs and semiprecious stones in Restoration London, and the use of sassafras. The strangest and most inspiring material was the research into American Indians, where everything is different from English history—from religion to diet, women’s rights to transport. Studying, visiting, and talking was like entering another world.
Were there any scenes—either due to their content or the research involved—that were particularly difficult to write? How did you work through them?
I was especially aware that in the American Indian history, I was writing about people who are not my ancestors, and whose descendants have already suffered from land and cultural theft. Indeed, they have suffered at the hands of people who are my ancestors. That gives me every reason to approach with sensitivity, caution, and awareness. That was one of the reasons that I made Ned a man between the worlds, so that he too was cautiously approaching a world he did not know. It also meant I was not attempting to tell the story of the American Indians directly—of course, they have their own storytellers. Instead, I was telling the story of a man who wanted to live in a New World without the cruelties of the old, and there were some like Ned but not, tragically, enough to change the course of that cruel hi
story. I read extensively from histories that were sensitive to these issues, and I am indebted to the readers from the Pokanoket nation for their advice and support.
You started your writing career writing about a fictional family, then transitioned to detailing the lives of Tudor and Plantagenet women. What do you feel is the greatest difference in writing wholly fictional rather than historical women?
In my first novel, Wideacre, there were no historical characters, the family lived in a historically accurate landscape of agricultural and political change, but they did not meet any recognizable historical characters. The Wise Woman also was wholly fictional against a historical landscape. But since then, I think all my historical fictions have had characters who were real people, and have been subjected to my increasing desire for history. I find the research much more interesting when it takes in whatever might have come up at the time—it is really rich and thought-provoking. And it leads me to characters that otherwise I would never have heard of! I’d never have researched Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford—a woman almost forgotten by history—if I had not written a novel about her daughter Elizabeth Woodville.
I really thought this series would be more fictional, but quite unconsciously I started the novel at a time when Charles I was in captivity, and I located the opening scene a mere twenty miles across the sea from him. As you may know, Charles I is featured in the novel and his failed rescue attempts are key to the action of the story. I don’t seem to be able to get away from historical events—nor do I want to. We are all determined by the times we live in, and to write of characters as if they were independent of their culture is not only unrealistic, but it is to miss one of the most interesting aspects of a life: how it is shaped by the times.
The technical difference is that writing about characters who have been recorded by history is about ten times more demanding than writing about wholly fictional ones! There are constant problems of location and action. Very few characters are fully recorded and many accounts are contradictory, which poses lots of problems as to which account should be trusted. There are the problems of historically recorded characters who just vanish from the records for years at a time. A historian can cheerfully leave a gap—but in a fiction all characters have to be plausibly accounted for. There are problems of controversial characters when I have to decide, as the author, whether I go with the traditionally accepted view of a historical character, or think for myself how they might appear to my fictional observer. But all these problems are worth the benefit of writing a fiction which is perfectly aligned with the known history and with the biographies—while keeping the liveliness and the authorial voice of fiction.
Your work now spans more than twenty-five novels, both historical and contemporary. What is your process for beginning a new novel?
It’s such an enjoyable process now, for I can trust it. I do a lot of general reading around the wider period and stay alert for anything that I think will be interesting—however unlikely it seems. For this series I am now reading Japanese, Chinese, and Indian history, as I think my story will take me to the East. I start to think about the characters—some will be carried forward from previous novels, but some will be new, and I think about what they will bring. I have an idea of what will be the events of the novel and I think about certain scenes in a quite detailed way. Then I start my specific research into historical characters who will occur and events that will happen, I create a strict historically accurate timeline—this goes on a massive chart, sometimes with overlays!—and I start the detailed plotting of the individual stories and scenes into the historical event. At the back of my mind is the broader question of what is happening in the history: Is there a notable historical trend during this time? And the question of my intent: What do I want to say in this novel? What do I want to learn in the course of writing? And now that I am in the midst of a series: How shall this novel end and what can I take forward to the next? One of the greatest guides is when I can’t bring myself to either read or write anything else but the new novel—that’s when I know I am ready to start. And then I simply do start, at the beginning. It’s important to get a lot of work done in the first few weeks so as not to lose momentum or confidence, but once I am about thirty thousand words in, I generally feel that I know where I am going. Then I read and write in tandem till I can write The End—which I always ritualistically do (though it’s not published like that), and then I can start thinking about how far I have achieved what I set out to do—and then rewrite.
Can you give us any hint of what comes next in the Fairmile series?
Oh! I’m very excited about it. It’s partly the story of Matteo, who is going to be his mother’s son, ambitious like her, and attach himself to the court of James II. Ned is going to come back to England with his son and try for one last push at a rebellion. Sarah and Felipe have established a legitimate business in Venice and London, and Johnnie is going to be an entrepreneur with the East India Company and make a fortune. The family is going to continue expanding the business with the ethics of Ned and Alinor in contrast to the increasingly ambitious and greedy world of the eighteenth century. That’s the plan now—it will be quite different in the writing, I know!
More from this Series
Tidelands
Book 1
More from the Author
The Last Tudor
Three Sisters, Three…
The Taming of the Queen
The King's Curse
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PHILIPPA GREGORY is the author of many New York Times bestselling novels and is a recognized authority on women’s history. Many of her works have been adapted for the screen, including The Other Boleyn Girl. She graduated from the University of Sussex and received a Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh, where she is a Regent. She holds honorary degrees from Teesside University and the University of Sussex, is a fellow of the Universities of Sussex and Cardiff, and was awarded the 2016 Harrogate Festival Award for Contribution to Historical Fiction. She is an honorary research fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. She founded Gardens for The Gambia, a charity to dig wells in poor rural schools in The Gambia, and has provided nearly two hundred wells. She welcomes visitors to her website, PhilippaGregory.com.
SimonandSchuster.com
www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/Philippa-Gregory
@AtriaBooks @AtriaBooks @AtriaBooks
GARDENS FOR THE GAMBIA
Philippa Gregory visited The Gambia, one of the driest and poorest countries of sub-Saharan Africa, in 1993 and paid for a well to be hand dug in a village primary school at Sika. Now—nearly two hundred wells later—she continues to raise money and commission wells in village schools, in community gardens, and in The Gambia’s only agricultural college. She works with her representative in The Gambia, headmaster Ismaila Sisay, and their charity now funds pottery and batik classes, beekeeping, and adult literacy programs.
GARDENS FOR THE GAMBIA is a registered charity in the UK and a registered NGO in The Gambia. Every donation, however small, goes to The Gambia without any deductions. If you would like to learn more about the work that Philippa calls “the best thing that I do,” visit her website, PhilippaGregory.com, and click on GARDENS FOR THE GAMBIA, where you can make a donation and join with Philippa in this project.
“Every well we dig provides drinking water for a school of about 600 children, and waters the gardens where they grow vegetables for the school dinners. I don’t know of a more direct way to feed hungry children and teach them to farm for their future.”
—Philippa Gregory
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
History
The Women of the Cousins’ War: The Duchess, the Queen, and the King’s Mother
The Plantagenet and Tudor Novels
The Lady of the Rivers
The Red Queen
The White Queen
The Kingmaker’s Daughter
The White Princess
The Constant Princ
ess
The King’s Curse
Three Sisters, Three Queens
The Other Boleyn Girl
The Boleyn Inheritance
The Taming of the Queen
The Queen’s Fool
The Last Tudor
The Virgin’s Lover
The Other Queen
Order of Darkness Series
Changeling
Stormbringers
Fools’ Gold
Dark Tracks
The Wideacre Trilogy
Wideacre
The Favored Child
Meridon
The Tradescants
Earthly Joys
Virgin Earth
Modern Novels
Alice Hartley’s Happiness
Perfectly Correct
The Little House
Zelda’s Cut
Short Stories
Bread and Chocolate
Other Historical Novels
The Wise Woman
Fallen Skies
A Respectable Trade
The Fairmile Series
Tidelands
Children’s Books
The Princess Rules
It’s a Prince Thing
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