“The Wise Woman” by Philippa Gregory

I first read this book when I was fifteen years’ old and in school. I couldn’t really tell anyone that I was a Philippa Gregory fan because of two things: the first thing is that I didn’t really go to school with other children that liked to read - they were more into hair, nails etc. and the second reason is that I wasn’t very popular anyway so I wouldn’t have had anyone to tell anyway. “The Wise Woman” wasn’t the first Philippa Gregory book I read but it was definitely one of my favourites because there was a big theme of vengeance and I love it when characters take revenge on people who were not very nice to them.

My first experience of reading this book was amazing, it was long but I made it through in less than three days because I would stay up just reading massive amounts at a time. I wouldn’t do my homework, but I’d read. I wouldn’t bother with school work, but I loved to read. So the only real lesson I bothered with was literature. In literature, I was encouraged to read, I was encouraged to learn - that really isn’t what I can say about the other lessons in that school. When I was reading Philippa Gregory’s books the first thing I noticed was that they were all about subversive women who did not like the position they were in even though it was a privileged one. As someone who was fifteen and going to a Catholic School that your parents had to pay for, I could definitely see where they were coming from with this. “The Wise Woman” is about a girl called Alys who lives with her mother and is accused of witchcraft when in reality she’s just a wise woman. She is a woman that heals people, a woman who uses herbal remedies and treatments, she is a midwife who can deliver babies to the rich and yet, she is still shunned and looked down on. I can definitely say that throughout the book, I felt like I was Alys in some respects. There were moments where she was problematic in her own way due to the time in which she lived, but the men of the court are always perfectly terrible and horrifying portraits of the men they actually were in the past. The treatment of women may have been bad but the treatment of women who were poor was even worse and the treatment of women who were poor and different was even worse than that and therefore, Alys had to fear for her life.

The second time I read it, I was about seventeen or eighteen years’ old and I was writing an essay about some Philippa Gregory books for my final essay before leaving for university. It was about the difference between the private lives and thoughts of women in Philippa Gregory’s novel compared to the way in which they act in front of company. The language is definitely completely different and the plot line of “The Wise Woman” is definitely different to any of the other Philippa Gregory book you’ll read. Unlike the ones about the courts and the royals, this one is mainly focused on the out of bounds parts of the court. This book focuses on the trials and tribulations of Alys and the way in which she comes into the court as a wise woman and an outsider.

I’ve read this book quite a few times since because every time I read it the novel takes me back to when I was building up my love for Philippa Gregory and life was easier, better, less stressful and all I had to do was read and read to my heart’s content…wait, that’s what I do now. However, Philippa Gregory was a huge influence on me throughout my teens, she is my favourite writer ever and honestly, I love every one of her books but “The Wise Woman” will always have a special place in my heart after being the book that I chose as my primary text for my A-Level essay just before I left for university. From Alys and her mother to the baby’s head imploding - yes, you read that correctly - I adore this book for its terrifying difference to every other Philippa Gregory book ever written.