First, let me welcome you to this novel, especially if you have come here from watching the Starz TV series. This novel, like all my recent novels, is solidly based on the facts and inspired by the real women of history whose stories have been neglected or even concealed in the past. Here you will find generations of women who have fought to make their way in a difficult world, and in many cases won their own way despite all the odds. These are the heroines of our history—every bit as courageous and colorful as the better-known men.

The White Princess is a novel about a young woman who was at the center of the Tudor takeover of England, a princess from the previous ruling family who had been the adored daughter of a charismatic and glamorous king, Edward IV, and his wife, the famously beautiful survivor Elizabeth Woodville—the subject of my novel and TV series The White Queen.

As usual with a woman’s history, the record tells us very little about Elizabeth of York. We know when she was born, February 11, 1466, and we know that she was a petted and favored daughter. Her parents did not send her away to a nursery palace nor did they marry her young and send her to a foreign court. They kept her with them during their struggles to hold the throne, and so she suffered two periods of imprisonment in sanctuary with her mother and siblings. The first time, they were freed by her father’s triumphant return and restoration, but the second time was at his death and they were in hiding from her uncle Richard III. Elizabeth’s mother negotiated with King Richard, and released her daughters to his court, even though both her sons had disappeared from the Tower while under his protection. To me, that indicates that it is very unlikely that Richard was the known murderer of the “princes in the Tower”—and this, of course, raises the question as to what happened to them— the true heirs of the throne of England, the greatest obstacles to Tudor ambition.

Shortly after the young princess Elizabeth of York arrived at Richard’s court, his only son and heir died and his wife, Anne Neville, became fatally ill. Almost certainly, Richard and Elizabeth fell in love and perhaps intended to marry. We know this for certain, because on the death of his wife, rumors that Richard was to marry his niece Elizabeth were so widespread that he was forced to deny them in public. We have a contemporary account of him standing in the great hall at St. John’s in the presence of the mayor and citizens of London and swearing that there was nothing between him and his beautiful niece.

There is wonderful research done, and waiting to be done, around this! From a lost letter in which Elizabeth declares her love for Richard, the rumors that Richard poisoned his wife so that he would be free to marry her— any historian who takes this story on has to decide whether Elizabeth of York, only eighteen years old, was gambling her own life and happiness on the outcome of the battle of Bosworth: formally betrothed to Henry Tudor, the Lancaster claimant, who was waiting to invade, but in love with Richard III.

At this dramatic moment this novel begins, and you will see how the story unfolds. Researching it and finding the actions and character of Elizabeth; her mother; her sisters; her cousins; her strange and formidable in-laws, the Tudors; and the young man who claimed that he was her lost brother was a fascinating journey of discovery and sifting of facts.

Because I write women’s history I rarely have the luxury of a full and fair biography to study. Until about 1960 there were very few histories written about women at all, and often I am faced with a blank or—worse—with an unfair condemnation of the woman. Tracing Elizabeth of York’s life was often speculation, and sometimes I found myself simply rebelling against the picture that the medieval chroniclers tried to force on the real woman; those who spoke of her “truly wonderful obedience.” Clearly, we cannot believe that she was only the passive pawn of Tudor ambition, a baby-making machine who chose a married motto of “Humble and penitent” when she had been raised by a rebel, was a princess of royal blood, and her own motto before marriage was “Sans removyr” which means (surely defiantly?) “unmoving” or “unchanging.”

A young woman of eighteen, who has witnessed her father driven from the throne and restored, her mother give birth in prison, her brother disappear from his own castle, who has engaged in an adulterous love affair with the king while betrothed to his enemy, and who claims the defiant motto “unchanging” is not anyone’s pawn! When I consider her education, her upbringing as a princess during a civil war, the teachings of her sophisticated and successful mother and diplomat grandmother, I certainly don’t see a passive victim. She must have been a dynamic character: someone who thinks about her circumstances, who makes up her own mind, and has a determination to work her will on her world.

As you will see, she was confronted with some terrible choices. A young man who claimed to be her missing brother—supported by most of the crowned heads of Europe—was captured by her husband and brought to the court. Her mother, aunt, and grandmother were in the conspiracy to support him against her husband. She never publicly spoke out for “the Boy,” nor defended her cousin, unjustly imprisoned and wrongfully executed, nor did she rescue her adored mother from house arrest. But just because we don’t have a record for something does not mean that it never happened. In my opinion, the young woman, who was the daughter of Elizabeth Woodville and the mother of Queen Margaret of Scotland, was an actor in her own life, a woman who worked for her hopes and ambitions behind the throne, who certainly knew more about ruling and more about England than her newly arrived husband ever would. She may have worked in secret, she must have struggled in private. Certainly she must have had her own strategy and plans for dealing with the king and the tyrannical expansion of Tudor power. This is her story—not his. She is the hero—not him. This is a novel of the times imagined through the eyes of a most interesting woman.

Historical fiction is a hybrid, a blending of reported reality, reasonable speculation, psychological truth, and the author’s imagination. I have loved this beautiful and inspiring form of writing for fifty years, and practiced it for thirty. Almost every working day I consider the quality of historical facts. Sometimes I find an account that is so convincing that I think it is close to reality—it can be translated directly to my page. Sometimes I find an honest error by a previous historian or a lie by a self-serving diarist that will have to be sifted and judged. Sometimes, and most excitingly, I find traces of a secret that we can only guess, or an absence which I will have to fill as a novelist. History itself is an unreliable narrator! But what I never do is willfully alter an agreed historical fact.

I never alter the facts of the known history, and I never exaggerate the drama. I have always found that the actual events themselves are dramatic enough—especially when I look at the likely actions of the women, and not the well-recorded events in the foreground. If a writer believes that women do nothing, then he will have to fantasize about their lives to make a good story. If a writer believes that women are weak, rivalrous, and moody, then she will produce an account of them in which they cannot work together, or be trusted. But I know from my reading and from my own life that women are powerful agents of change who can collaborate together, who may love each other, and I base my story on the reality.

But I may include speculative history. In The Virgin’s Lover, I was writing about the death of Amy Dudley, neglected wife of Robert Dudley, and I could not believe that she accidentally fell downstairs and broke her neck on the very day after Elizabeth I had said that she was likely to die. The accepted history was against me, but the tidy skirts around the dead body, the short flight of stairs, the convenient disgrace of her husband who was widely suspected of killing her all suggested to me that someone had framed Robert Dudley by killing his wife, so that he would give up any hope of marriage with the queen, but be forever available to her. That judgment guided my novel and I wrote an author’s note to explain my thinking. Six years after publication, historian Chris Skidmore found an account of the postmortem of Amy Dudley which described “2 dints” in her skull. Amy Dudley was murdered and what I had written as fiction was, in fact, history. I came to my conclusion because I was interested in Amy Dudley: not only as a wife, a rival to the far more important Elizabeth I, but as a woman—of interest to me in her own right. I saw evidence that mattered because I was thinking about her, not about her husband. For my books are not only historical fiction, they are also women’s history, a feminist take on women’s history.

Writing as a feminist means giving my heroines the benefit of the doubt that is customarily extended to men. For instance, there is a rich vein of scholarship asking “What is wrong with Henry VIII?” All of these studies start with the assumption that Henry was a healthy child (indeed, rather a charming one) and that he changed and deteriorated over his life. Many historians are intensely sympathetic towards this man who judicially murdered his close friends and advisors, two of his six ill-treated wives, one of their friends, and one innocent elderly cousin.

In contrast, some studies of women hardly recognize that the women had a childhood at all, least of all that they changed and grew. So Catherine Howard is represented as a “slut” almost from birth, held accountable for her sexual abuse by an older tutor, blamed for juvenile sexual experimentation with a young friend. It is no surprise to the misogynistic historian that she ends on the scaffold for adultery. In this reading of history, Elizabeth Woodville, who married a young king within six weeks of meeting him, must have been a coldhearted older gold digger who (typically) mislaid her sons and set her daughter to seduce their murderer; Margaret Beaufort was a religious obsessive, Mary Tudor another, only more neurotic; Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scotland, ineffectual and silly; her granddaughter Mary Queen of Scots suicidally ill-judging and amorous.

For me, working as a feminist historian means looking at all these damaging stereotypes and comparing them with the facts we really know about the women. I try to look through the assumptions of misogyny to see if I can see anything that looks like a real woman— someone with contradictory impulses, and information; who acts powerfully and effectively (sometimes in secret); who does the best she can (perhaps only for herself); who makes mistakes (but not because of innate stupidity); who fights, negotiates, and manipulates for what freedom and benefits she can in a society which is deliberately oppressive. I look at the one-dimensional historical record and I try to read through it and round it, to see the real woman that it caricatures.

When I look for real women from birth to death (and not simply the brief years of courtship and marriage), I find women who sought and found an education; women who thought deeply on their spiritual lives and contributed to religious debate; queens who raised armies, even led them; women who were stewards and landowners, entrepreneurs, merchants, capitalists, collectors. I find women whose roles as mothers, sisters, and daughters were equal or more significant than their roles as lovers or wives. Women who were interesting in their own right.

Mary Boleyn, one of the principal characters of my novel and the film The Other Boleyn Girl, was ignored before my novel spawned four nonfiction biographies. Before the novel she was known only as Henry VIII’s mistress and the “hackney” of the King of France. But this woman managed to survive Henry VIII, marry the man of her choice, surmount her family disgrace, and inherit their properties as a major landowner. I have seen the local records that show her managing forest and agricultural lands and evading her taxes. She educated her children to rise at the court of Elizabeth and become wealthy landowners in their own turn, and so founded a Tudor dynasty.

Another woman “hidden from history,” to use Sheila Rowbotham’s powerful phrase, is Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford—grandmother to the White Princess. When I started my research, there was no biography of her at all. I had to find her through her husbands, her family, and by tracing her through royal service and her relationship with her daughter, the White Queen. Yet she was a woman whose life and work were outside the home and whose impact was far from the domestic. If she had been a man, we would surely have a biography describing her as a commander, a diplomat, a courtier, a landowner, and the founder of a dynasty. Since she was a woman she is all but ignored.

I have studied the lives of more than twenty medieval woman in detail and in none of my accounts of them have I exaggerated their importance or significance to the national history; I found all of them to be women working effectively at the most powerful level that they could attain, and in all instances (since these are aristocratic women) commanding large numbers of men and women. These are not women who have been “hidden from history” because their work is outside history, concealed in the home, or removed from great events. These women are unnoticed because nobody has wanted to celebrate them. When they take their place on the national stage, they are explained away as an aberration, not examined as power players. Militant might in women is named as unfeminine aggression; scholarship in women is diminished into a domestic art. Religious life is viewed as sexual chastity rather than spiritual awakening to an international philosophy. Their political power, sometimes undercover, is often concealed by the women themselves, and their triumphs were hidden from their contemporaries—and from history.

Over and over again the historical record tells me only about the men, and I have to struggle to prevent my story veering towards male heroes. It is hard to tell the story of Elizabeth of York without her farbetter-known husband, Henry VII, as the hero. Henry himself, Jasper Tudor, and Thomas Stanley are all described as powerful coherent agents of their own lives, but the enemies that Henry feared—Margaret, Dowager Duchess of Burgundy, and Elizabeth Woodville—are written off as harpies filled with pointless malice, or as women crazed by grief. His greatest supporter, the leader of the anti-York rebellion to put Henry Tudor on his throne, was his mother, Margaret Beaufort—but the conventional histories follow her own declaration that she was wholly guided by God’s will, as if she did not live her life with absolute determination and successful strategy. The rebellion against Richard III that she led has gone down in history as “Buckingham’s Rebellion,” because Margaret Beaufort, as mother of the king of England, used the official court history to cover her tracks as a powerful politician, royal advisor, and treasonous rebel against the Plantagenet kings. For the benefit of her reputation she herself hid her determined and ruthless ambition.

She is not the only woman whose ambition and political power have been concealed as if these qualities are an unladylike embarrassment. There is a convention that Elizabeth Woodville, the White Queen, made the terrible mistake of giving her two sons up to their murderer, and then retired, heartbroken, into private life. But there is no doubt in my mind that she continued to rally her forces and cleverly and carefully plotted for the return of her missing son. The king certainly feared this—the massive expansion of a spy system to look for “the Boy” shows up in the royal accounts. Elizabeth Woodville’s enmity to the Tudor usurper was so cleverly concealed that it is hard to find traces of it then or now except in Henry VII’s panicky reaction. But that does not mean that it did not exist. When her son-in-law Henry VII put her under house arrest at Bermondsey Abbey, it was her third imprisonment; she had been a persistent and courageous conspirator all her life. We can see from her will that, even on her deathbed, she was still plotting: financing a rebellion against him.

But the misogynistic view of history explains women’s motives as neurotic, even psychotic. It is the get-out clause for lazy historians who cannot account for active, powerful women. Margaret Beaufort; Margaret, Dowager Duchess of York; Elizabeth Woodville; and Jacquetta Rivers have all been labeled as religious fanatics, hysterics, or witches. But in fact they were formidable and persistent politicians, deploying the weapons they had available. It is such a mistake to try to write them out of history! We should try to understand and explain them— rather than explaining them away.

I am proud of my working life, looking through the historical record to see what really happened, and reading through the stereotypes to imagine what real women were like. I am pleased when people discover these wonderful women. I feel I owe it to the women that their stories should be told fully by us—the descendants and heirs to their very real struggles and genuine victories. And so I hope very much that you will find this novel is a gateway to take you closer to the lives of your inheritance, your forebears: these real women and their world.