Philippa Gregory on the 100 novels that shaped her fiction

By Tom Whitfield

Philippa Gregory read and analysed more than 100 of the most popular 18th-century novels for her PhD thesis, calling the exercise “the perfect author’s apprenticeship.”

The novelist’s account starts earlier. Her mother read her a bedtime story, but by around age three Gregory had stopped looking at pictures and started reading the text. She then read to herself, taking four books a week from the library.

History, gothic fiction and Jane Austen

Gregory names Alison Goudge’s The Little White Horse as her favourite childhood book. She praises its combination of history and gothic fantasy: realistic and charming, but frightening without being nightmarish. She says it started her love of historical fiction and has become a family favourite for her own children.

As a teenager, Gregory says all her books changed her. She read voraciously, enjoyed Rudyard Kipling and later turned to historical fiction, especially Georgette Heyer. She read all of Jane Austen’s novels early and learned to value economy of style and precision. “She still seems to me the finest writer in the English language,” Gregory says.

A model for hidden history

Gregory credits EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class with changing her mind. She calls it a radical account of the emergence of a working-class consciousness. Reading it as a young woman, she says, revealed the real importance of writing history and the passion a great historian can bring.

The book became a model for her own work, teaching her that she could find and write a hidden history. Gregory does not specify which earlier belief Thompson displaced, so that claim remains personal rather than fully examined.

For her PhD thesis, Gregory read more than 100 of the most popular 18th-century novels, among them Don Quixote, Clarissa, Gulliver’s Travels and Moll Flanders. She analysed every one, learning about structure, characterisation and tempo. More importantly, she learned the craft of novel writing while the form was still taking shape.

What does this change for an aspiring writer?

Gregory’s answer is a method rather than a list of recommendations: read a large body closely, then examine how each book works. Her account also sets that formal study beside EP Thompson’s lesson that history can expose a hidden subject. The source names only four of the 100-plus titles, gives no measure of their popularity and does not present a ranked canon. Its value is practical testimony rather than a definitive history of the period.

Books she kept and found

Charles Dickens took longer to win Gregory over. She says she did not enjoy him until later in life, but now places him among the great writers of big novels. Her favourite is Dombey and Son. Gregory describes its combination of sentimentality around a beautiful, frail child with the story of a merciless social climber. She calls it a great and unpredictable read.

Gregory rereads Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, the Sea whenever she needs comfort. She believes great writing gives any experience significance and that a good novel can transport readers to another place and time. For her, Murdoch’s book explores the struggle to possess someone you love when possession cannot be achieved, to release oneself from vanity and greed, and to recognise deep companions and friends. She also values its account of a gossipy, vain theatre director in retirement by the sea.

Gregory says she discovered the between-the-wars Anglo-Irish novelist Molly Keane recently, although she supplies no date. At first sight, Keane’s stories charm through their eccentric Anglo-Irish wealthy elite, Gregory says, but every novel registers the injustice beneath that society. Her favourite, Good Behaviour, follows two siblings who live for hunting on an enormous estate and care only for each other, their horses and dogs, and their father, whom they call “The Sir”. Gregory sees in it a portrait of a vanished society and a fictional creation of unusual charm.

Her later reading adds a test beyond technical analysis: a book can remain a source of comfort, surprise or discovery long after apprenticeship ends. For a would-be writer, the practical case is to build a reading life that supports both close study and personal attachment.