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.