Philippa Gregory's Dawnlands is the third book in The Fairmile Series

"We both fell about laughing because Game of Thrones is absolutely The Wars of the Roses and that's what I'd based a few of my novels on completely separately.

"We both laughed at the fact that we'd both come to this very, very dramatic, difficult period in English history and taken off in completely different directions."

But you'll never find a dragon in one of Gregory's books. She's best known for novels such as The Other Boleyn Girl and The White Queen and likes to twist her stories around historical facts.

"Every novel takes about a year of solid research and six months of reading while I'm writing, researching specific questions which come up during the writing," she says.

"But it's a joy, I love to write the way I do. I base it so closely on the historical events.

"I wouldn't write historical fantasy or historical romance, because it's just not what I like to read, it's not what I like to write.

"Everybody's absolutely welcome to take history and do what they like with it, but I like to stay pretty close to the events."

Indeed, Gregory is pleased to see a resurgence in history through popular culture. She mentions television shows like Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon, Bridgerton, Outlander, even The Crown.

"There's less of a kid-glove approach to it now, take a show like Bridgerton, take a historical period and do what you like with it and maybe people are learning about history kind of by accident ... is that a bad thing?

"The difficulty is that sometimes you are learning a fantasy."

She's had several of her novels adapted for the screen. The Other Boleyn Girl starred Natalia Portman, Scarlett Johansson and Eric Bana as Henry VIII. But she's just made sure part of the contract going forward is that the history isn't altered.

"I'd got to the stage where I couldn't stand saying to producers, 'You have the rights to the book, you can adapt the book, but that doesn't mean that you can change the underlying history because everybody will know and we'll look like idiots'," she told stuff.co.nz.

Gregory's love of history started at university. She was a bit of a rebel at school, she actually got two E grades in history in her final years at high school. "I hated history," she says.

She worked as a cadet journalist for a year or two before heading to the University of Sussex as a mature-age student to study English literature. She was required to take a history class and loved it.

"I realised then that history answers all the existential questions of life, it teaches us everything," she said.

So she changed courses and has been reading and writing history ever since.

While her novels are set across the broader historical background, it's the every day that fascinates Gregory, particularly this series she's writing now.

Dawnlands is the third novel in The Fairmile Series, spanning the years 1648-1685, so far.

It opened with Tidelands in 2019, where we meet Alinor Reekie and her children, a poor family living in a tiny coastal village on the south coast of England at the end of the Civil War. She's a midwife and herbalist, accused of witchcraft and has to flee her childhood home.

In book two, Dark Tides, Alinor and her daughter Alys are working women running a small wharf on the banks of the Thames, entangled in their past in a changing world.

Now in Dawnlands, the saga continues. It's 1685 and England is on the brink of another civil war against the Stuart kings and Alinor and her family must make some hard choices.

There are more books to come, says Gregory.

"What I wanted to do with this series was look at women's lives, they're fictional women but they're very, very closely based on the reality of how women lived over a long period. I'm hoping to take this series to the 20th century, ultimately," she says.

"I like to ask myself what the conditions were like, what jobs were they doing - in the 17th century women were working in the mercantile trades, in shipping and retail - but also what was life like at home, and what does that tell us?"

She says sometimes history is a lesson for the present, but perhaps not in the best way.

"What hasn't changed, in the most depressing way, is the habit of violence against women, what hasn't changed is the habit of underpaying women, of not rewarding women for the invisible work that most women do for their families most of the time.

"What history does teach us is that women who do manage to run a business successfully and raise children successfully, without any thought of equality, is there's an incredible perseverance to them.

"When you look at the stories of men throughout history, they are stories of heroes who are doing exceptional things, but actually normal women in history are behaving with exceptional heroism, probably every day of their lives."

She takes some affront to the question of whether she's ever caught between writing a best-selling story and staying true to the history.

"Why would it be hard to reconcile that?" she says. "My books are best sellers because they are anchored in the historical reality and that's what people like about them."

That said, she admits that if she lands in some research that is "boring her to death", she'll do a rethink, "but it doesn't happen very often".

She's enjoying the Fairmile series, it's coming into the 18th century, the era she did her PhD on, a period she loves and feels very comfortable in.

We ponder what historical fiction might be like in 100, 200 years, will people be writing novels set in 2022?

"I'm sure they will be, we all have a great desire to talk about earlier times, even of our childhood. I think we have an innate interest in our own personal past and in our nation's past, the world's past. That's the thing that is completely fascinating as an historian, is that when people come to tell the story of, for instance, the Coronavirus pandemic, I don't know, in 100 years time what will be most striking?

"Will the judgment of history be that everybody should have locked down much earlier, or that it was a miracle that we got through it?

"Or will the focus be on the ... discovery of a vaccine, or will the attention be on the people who denied it, whether there will be any kind of evidence, which suggests why some people caught it and some didn't, it will be fascinating."

Because, as she suggests, sometimes the truth is more fascinating than fiction.

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