This teaching guide for The Women of the Cousins' War includes an introduction and discussion questions for enhancing your book club. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.


INTRODUCTION

The Women of the Cousins’ War is a three-part biography of the heroines of Philippa Gregory’s Cousins’ War books. Together with the historians David Baldwin and Michael Jones, Gregory re-creates the extraordinary lives and times of Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford; Elizabeth Woodville, queen of England; and Margaret Beaufort, the matriarch of the House of Tudor.

In her introduction, Gregory writes revealingly about the differences among history, fiction, and historical fiction. She looks at why women have been excluded from the production of history and from history itself. How are fictional and historical narratives shaped by their authors? By turning her attention to three women, whose remarkable lives have gone largely unexamined by scholars, Gregory restores them to the historical record and raises important questions about the responsibility of the historian and the significance of women in medieval English society.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Dr. Philippa Gregory studied history at the University of Sussex and received a Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh. She is a recognized author on women’s history; the author of several bestselling n see more