""There is more to the story than this, of course’" Topic

Character and Affect in Philippa Gregory's The White Queen,

"Philippa Gregory's 2009 novel The White Queen takes as its heroine Elizabeth Woodville who was queen of England from 1464–1470 and again from 1471–1483. It is the first in Gregory's series that fictionalises the Wars of the Roses from the imagined perspectives of prominent women of the period and, as in her earlier ‘Tudor Court' series, she aims to bring to the fore women whom she argues have been marginalised by traditional histories. Promotional material for the novel describes Woodville as ‘almost–unknown' and Gregory has argued that her heroine has been the subject of ‘only one reliable biography', or that the ‘existing' biographies were out of print when she began writing. Historical fiction offers an apt medium with which to critique the exclusion of women's voices and experiences from history; its association with women writers and readers means that there exists an established tradition of historical novels telling women's stories, while its imaginative capacity allows authors to invent unrecorded details omitted from the historical record. Gregory has embraced the genre's potential for offering new interpretations of historical women. She has argued that it allows her to speculate as to the ‘emotions, motives and unconscious desires' of those women about whom she writes and, in turn, consider how they may have experienced and perceived significant historical events. Affect is thus fundamental to Gregory's novels; it is not sufficient to reconsider the actions and experiences of women without considering possible motives and responses…"
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