Tidelands Read online

  What is interesting to me as a historian is how the fortunes of every family reflect in their small way the fortunes of the nation. We are all the products of both national and family history. What is interesting to me as a feminist is how these fortunes are so often invisibly guided by women. What is interesting to me as a novelist is whether it is possible to tell a fictional story which tells a historical truth: what the world and the nation were like at the time, what the individuals were thinking, doing, and feeling, and how change comes about for them all.

  This is a big ambition, and it’s going to be, I hope, a big series, starting with this novel set in an obscure and isolated area of England during the English Civil War, tracing the family through the Restoration, through enlightenment, and empire. I don’t know how far my family will travel nor do I know when their story will end. I don’t know how many books I will write nor in how many countries they will make a home. But I do know that when I write about ordinary people rather than royals, the story at once becomes more surprising; and when I write about women, I am engaging with a history which is almost always untold.

  Between writing the novels for this series I am working on a history of women in England. My interest has moved from the individual women of the court to the millions of women of town and country. I am finding women written off by previous historians as “ordinary,” whose experiences are obscured by time and lost to history—widely regarded as not worth recording in the first place. But these are our foremothers—interesting to us for that reason alone. These are women making the nation, just as much as their more visible better-recorded fathers, brothers, and sons. Thinking like this about women’s history has led me inevitably to want to write a different sort of historical fiction—the fiction of an unwritten history.

  Many fine writers have taken the leap into the unknown to fictionalize little-known history. Ann Baer’s Down the Common is a particularly interesting example: a fictional account of a working woman who would usually not make the archive, and so not enter history, and so leave no trace for the novelist to animate. Very helpful for the Isle of Wight section of this story was Jan Toms’s To Serve Two Masters: Colonel Robert Hammond, the King’s Gaoler, which is a splendid example of local detailed history that adds so much to the national story. I drew my account of Charles and his trial mostly from two great biographies: D. R. Watson’s The Life and Times of Charles I and Charles Carlton’s Charles I: The Personal Monarch, as well as his poignant Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars, 1638–1651. For general history I consulted, among many others, Robert Ashton’s The English Civil War: Conservatism and Revolution, 1603–1649. Lucy Moore’s Lady Fanshawe’s Receipt Book: The Life and Times of a Civil War Heroine was inspiring both for the recipes and for the history of a woman, like James’s mother, who went into exile with the royal family. Of course, I read many more books than these titles; and I am grateful to the very many fine historians, and to the staff of West Sussex Records office for their welcome and for the care they take of their local maps and documents. Among these was some fine research from local history groups, a reminder of the importance of libraries and local adult education.

  The novel is set in Selsey Island, near Chichester, a place which was my home for several years in the 1980s. I revisited it for research for this book and once again found a small place of extraordinary richness and beauty. The main character, Alinor, is entirely fictional but representative of the working women of her time: excluded from power, from wealth and education, but nonetheless making lives for themselves as best as they can. Women had no formal political power when the whole country was deciding for or against a monarchy, but we see from the debates, from the public demonstrations, from civil disobedience, and from the massive women-only petitions presented to the parliament that they were opinionated, active, and vocal. When we honor women who demanded the vote, sought rights over their own money and their own bodies, we should remember that even before them millions of ordinary women simply assumed the rights they wanted and lived their lives in quiet defiance of the law and of convention. Their successes are rarely recorded (except in specialist studies) because they chose discreet personal victory to acknowledgment. These were not exemplary feminist victories: by one woman for the benefit of all women. They were personal triumphs: one woman for herself and perhaps her daughters. But we see in these individual stories the pattern of female perseverance and success which, in practical day-to-day experience, defies and defeats the oppression of their times. For much of English history women have been legal nonentities. But they always lived as if they mattered.

  Alinor is a woman like this. To outside appearances—which at the end, are all that James can see—she is in a hopeless state. The best she can wish for is survival without falling into poverty in a period where poor people died of hunger and want. But, even poor and shamed, Alinor is of interest to herself: she has hopes, she has ambition, she is not fatalistic, she plans a better future. Her terrible trial was not unusual for women of her time—there were uncounted witch trials up and down the country in the seventeenth century; more than three thousand people were named as witches and executed in Britain; many more were questioned and tested, mostly women.

  But the rumors about Alinor do not define her, neither does the hardship she endures. She continues to insist on an independent moral judgment and on her own independent thinking and feeling. Dependent upon her neighbors for a living, dependent on a man for her status, she nonetheless thinks, feels, and lives for herself. At a time when women counted for nothing, she values herself. She is—if only to herself—a heroine. Certainly she and all the other women of history who have found their way through unmarked, treacherous times are heroines to me, and Tidelands is their story.

  This reading group guide for Tidelands includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Philippa Gregory. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

  Introduction

  On Midsummer Eve, Alinor waits in the church graveyard, hoping to encounter her missing husband’s ghost and thus confirm his death. Instead, she meets a stranger, a man named James, who is a Catholic priest and a spy in secret service to the exiled King Charles. The political tides are also unpredictable; England is in a civil war, and it is dangerous to take any stand when power shifts daily. Alinor lives in a dangerous no-man’s-land—neither maiden, wife, nor widow—a place that mirrors the treacherous, watery landscape that surrounds her tiny village. The suspicious, close-minded villagers watch as her fortunes rise due to her industriousness and her ambitions for her son and daughter. They don’t know that Alinor is also walking on a knife-edge of political intrigue as well as having an affair in which she and James are breaking their most sacred vows. Her choices will determine her family’s fate for generations to come.

  Topics and Questions for Discussion

  1. From the opening page, the reader is immediately pulled into the unique setting of the book. Alinor lives in an ever-changing physical landscape known to outsiders as Foulmire. How much does this in-between geography shape the people who live there? How much is it a reflection of the personalities that can manage the ever-changing conditions of the tidelands? Why do you think the author used this setting for a book that takes place during England’s Civil War?

  2. At their first parting, James tells Alinor, “ ‘I did not know that there could be a woman like you, in a place like this.’ ” That sentence is repeated throughout the book but with changing meanings. Alinor even rephrases it at the moment she is considering suicide. Ultimately, what kind of woman does James see Alinor as? How does she come to see herself?

  3. The story is told in the third person, but alternates between Alinor’s perspective and James’s. When King Charles refuses to be rescued, the rea