March 13, 2026
This is the fourth post in “The Research Behind the Story,” a six-part series exploring how award-winning historical fiction writers use travel and on-location research to create the novels we love.
Philippa Gregory doesn’t mince words about research. In interviews, she’s said that if you’re writing historical fiction, at least half your time and work should be devoted to it. Not a quarter. Not “as much as you can fit in.” Half.
She’s also said something that sounds simple but carries enormous weight for writers planning research trips: “I almost always travel to the sites I describe and I always find that very inspiring and often moving.”
Geraldine Brooks would agree. A Pulitzer Prize winner and former Wall Street Journal war correspondent, Brooks has built her fiction career on the same instinct that made her a great journalist — go to the source. Don’t trust the secondhand account. Stand in the room. Open the archive. Ask the awkward question.
These two writers share a background in journalism and a philosophy about research that sets them apart: they treat historical fiction as investigative work. And their results speak for themselves.
Gregory is often introduced as a novelist, but she’s a historian by training and instinct. When asked what inspires her to write historical fiction, she’s described a compulsion that will be familiar to any research-minded traveler: “In almost any circumstances I always ask, but how did it get like this? How did it start?”
Her research process reflects that curiosity. She doesn’t just read the major histories. She digs into what she calls the “specialized history” of a period — coinage, agriculture, transport, domestic life. “All those things that the reader should not know that I have researched,” she’s said, “but they should feel at home in the detail of the Tudor world.”
And then she goes to the places.
Gregory’s Tudor novels — The Other Boleyn Girl, The White Queen, and dozens more — are set in palaces, estates, and landscapes that still exist across England. She has walked the corridors of Hampton Court, stood in the chapels where her characters prayed, and traced the routes her queens traveled. When she began her Tidelands series, set in the English Civil War, the starting point was a physical one — she’d been thinking about Soames Forsyte traveling to a rural area of England to find his family’s homestead, only to find himself stuck in the mud. “Most of us start in a muddy field somewhere,” Gregory said, “and so I thought, that’s where I want to start this story.”
For Gregory, the mud isn’t a metaphor. It’s a research finding.
Her advice to aspiring historical fiction writers includes a line that should be pinned above every writer’s desk: “Never write for the marketplace, you can’t judge it, and you certainly can’t catch up with it. Always write the very best you can about the things that you feel passionate about.”
Brooks came to fiction after more than a decade as a foreign correspondent covering conflicts in the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. That background gave her something most novelists don’t have: a trained instinct for going to difficult places and finding the human story inside the chaos.
Her first novel, Year of Wonders, began with a chance encounter. While living in England in 1990, she stumbled onto the village of Eyam in Derbyshire — a real village that, in 1666, voluntarily quarantined itself to contain an outbreak of plague. The village lost roughly a third of its population. The written record of what happened is scant — a few letters from the rector, some histories written years later with questionable accuracy.
That gap between the factual scaffolding and the unknowable human experience is exactly where Brooks likes to work. “I love to find stories from the past where we can know something, but not everything,” she’s said, “where there is enough of a historical record to have left us with an intriguing factual scaffolding, but where there are also enough unknowable voids in that record to allow room for imagination to work.”
For People of the Book, inspired by the real history of the Sarajevo Haggadah, Brooks went to labs and interviewed scientists and conservators, observing their work firsthand. For Horse, based on the true story of a champion 19th-century racehorse named Lexington, she visited the Smithsonian’s Museum Support Center to see the horse’s actual bones.
In every case, the pattern is the same: go to the source. Not the secondary source. Not the summary. The actual place, the actual object, the actual person who knows.
What Gregory and Brooks share isn’t just a willingness to do research — most historical fiction writers do plenty of research. What sets them apart is the investigative quality of their approach. They don’t just absorb information. They interrogate it.
Gregory has said that her journalist’s training taught her “to ask the awkward questions — and this pays dividends in historical research too.” Brooks has described the same instinct in different terms, talking about the way a journalist learns to be skeptical of official narratives and to look for the stories that fall between the cracks of the historical record.
For a writer planning a research trip, this approach suggests something important: the goal isn’t just to see the places you’re writing about. It’s to ask questions while you’re there. Who lived here? What has changed? What has been preserved, and why? What has been forgotten, and why? Who can tell you things that aren’t in the guidebook?
This is where local expertise matters enormously. A destination management company, a local historian, an archivist at a regional library, a guide who knows the area’s stories — these are the people who can turn a sightseeing trip into an investigative one. They’re the equivalent of the sources a journalist cultivates, and they’re the difference between coming home with photographs and coming home with a novel.
Eyam, Derbyshire — The plague village that inspired Year of Wonders is still there, preserved and interpreted as a historical site. You can visit the church where the rector persuaded his congregation to seal themselves in, walk between the cottages where families died, and see the boundary stones where food was exchanged for coins left in vinegar. It’s an extraordinary place — quiet, rural, and haunted in the best possible way for a writer.
Tudor England — Gregory’s novels span dozens of locations, but the major ones are accessible and well-preserved: Hampton Court Palace, the Tower of London, Hever Castle (the Boleyn family home), Ludlow Castle, and many more. A writer working on anything Tudor-adjacent could spend a week visiting the actual places where the Plantagenet and Tudor dramas unfolded.
Sarajevo — For People of the Book readers, the Sarajevo Haggadah is real and can be seen at the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The city itself is a layered, complex place that rewards the same kind of investigative curiosity that Brooks brings to her fiction.
The Smithsonian — Brooks’s research for Horse took her to the Museum Support Center in Suitland, Maryland, where she saw the skeleton of the racehorse Lexington. It’s a reminder that research destinations aren’t always scenic — sometimes the most important stop is a warehouse, an archive, or a lab.
Gregory and Brooks offer a model for research travel that’s more structured and intentional than the serendipitous approach we saw with Doerr and Chevalier. Their work suggests a few principles:
Research isn’t a phase — it’s half the work. Gregory’s rule of thumb is a useful benchmark. If you’re spending 90% of your time writing and 10% researching, the proportions might be off.
Ask the awkward questions. When you visit a location, don’t just observe. Interrogate. Talk to local historians, archivists, and guides. Ask what’s been lost, what’s been changed, what the official story leaves out. The most valuable research findings are often the ones that challenge your assumptions.
Go to the source. Secondary sources are useful, but they’re someone else’s interpretation. Whenever possible, seek out the primary material — the archive, the artifact, the landscape itself.
Build a research network. Both Gregory and Brooks describe working with specialists — historians, scientists, conservators. A good research trip includes not just places but people. Building those connections before you travel can make the difference between a productive trip and a frustrating one.
Next in the series: “When Family Memory Is the Research” — the case for heritage and genealogy as historical fiction research.
Stacy Dillon is the founder of Early & Away Travel Company, where she plans research travel for writers, book clubs, and heritage travelers.]
Trip announcements, curated reading lists, and the occasional dispatch — before anyone else.