Female Speaker: From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Carlos Lozada: Good afternoon, and welcome to the National Book Festival. My name is Carlos Lozada. I am the editor of the Sunday Outlook section at "The Post." "The Post" is a charter sponsor of the festival and has been in the 11 years that this wonderful event has been going on and I hope it will be for many more. When you've traveled the world as a child as the daughter of a diplomat, and then begin writing your own novels and stories by age 10, it was probably fated that you would become a historical novelist, and in the case of Margaret George, we're all the happy beneficiaries of this fate. Margaret George is one of the top historical novelists working today. A writer who engages in arduous, pain-staking research before telling the stories of her characters, but once she does, you'll never see them in the same way again. She has written about Helen of Troy and Henry VIII, Mary Queen of Scots, and Mary Magdalene. Her novel, "The Memoirs of Cleopatra," was made into a television miniseries. This is an author who takes characters that she feels have been wronged or misinterpreted by history and redeems them, or at least gives them a fair shake. Her latest book is entitled, "Elizabeth I, a Novel." Please join me in welcoming Margaret George. [applause] Margaret George: Hi. Everybody hear me? Good. Well, I'm absolutely delighted to be here and I thank you all for coming to this closing session. I'm afraid some of you may have, like talk fatigue, and book fatigue by now, but I appreciate you all being here. This has been wonderful for me, because not only is it an honor to be invited, but I myself have enjoyed hearing the other writers. I've learned a lot about how they work and I got to meet some interesting people. So, you know, I never met a writer until I was 25, and that was only because he was a friend of the family's, not because I met him as a writer. So, you know, we would see writers on television and you would see interviews with them, but these kind of things, these festivals, and that people are much more accessible, writers, you can meet them now and they're real people and get a lot more interaction between your readers and the writers, and that's a great change from the way that I grew up. And, you know, I'm curious about how other writers work, because we're all so different. A few days ago, yesterday I guess, Dave Eggers was giving advice about someone asked him about what you do if you want to be a writer and he gave all this advice that was completely different than what I would have given. You know, we all work differently, and it's the one profession, or one of the professions left in which there is no set path to becoming a writer. It's not like medical school where, you know, first you have to take science courses, then you take exams, and then you go to medical school for many years, and then you become an intern, and then a resident and board certified and you come out on the other end and you're a doctor. Well, writers come from all walks of life. Some of them, like the distinguished historian that's been here at this festival, Edward Morris, never went to college. You get people coming from all kinds of different directions and that's fun, because I would really be kind of, I think, at a loss if there became a rigid, one way to become a writer. I know that they're working on trying to figure out what creativity is so they can put it in a pill, but I hope that day doesn't come, because it would put me and a lot of other people out of business. I think creativity is a great mystery. We really don't know where it comes from and there's lots of different ways to be creative with different professions, but the one consistent trait, and I've heard this now at this festival, is that people who grow up to be writers usually read a lot as children. They absorb it. They seem to take to reading very early and, in many cases, cannot just read enough. I mean, stories are about, you know, they read all the books in the library by the time he was 12, a small library, not the Library of Congress, but I follow that same path. My father, as the introducer said, my father joined the Foreign Service when I was four and I think it's interesting people that know people here that their parents were in the Foreign Service is that depending on what your father's assignment was and what age it hit you at, will really determine so much of you. In other words, if your father is assigned to a certain country when you're a certain age, you might be a very different person than if he was assigned to it when you were older, or your brothers and sisters are going to have a different experience. So, my father, his first assignment when I was four, five, and six, was to Taiwan. It was not the Taiwan we know now. It was a very rural kind of island and long before Chiang Kai-shek and I couldn't read yet. I actually did not learn to read until fairly late. I was like six and a half. So, I got read to. I don't know that the theme of this festival is the joys of being read to aloud. My father had gotten these Greek Mythologies for children. So, those were my bedtime stories for like two years. I loved them, but that really influenced me a lot, because it made me think that there was more than just what you saw. For example, if you have a sunflower it isn't just a flower, it's a beautiful nymph who was in love with Apollo and she followed him across the sky day and after and would droop and so she was changed into a flower out of the mercy of the Gods. So, this whole world of fantasy that you've got in the Greek Mythologies, that influenced me a lot and I think I still really believe in magic and those kinds of things. The next assignment that he had, which was a completely different sort of thing, was Israel. I lived there when I was seven, eight, and nine. I think that's probably the most pivotal and influential place that I lived at that crucial time, because that's where I got my love of history, because I was just surrounded by history and I was still at this age where I could be very influenced by what was around me. So, my school was in Jaffa, which was the old sea port of Israel. They didn't really have a sea port until Herod the Great built Caesarea up, but through most of the Bible times, Jaffa, bad as it was, was it. That's where Hiram of Tyre sent down the Cedars of Lebanon to help build the temple of Jerusalem and it's where Jonah set sail and soon met the whale right off shore. It also was where Peter spent a lot of time in the early part of his ministry. Not only was it the place where he had the dream that told him to go to the house of the Roman and it was okay to consort with gentiles, but it also is the place where he supposedly raised a little girl from the dead, Tabitha. My school was on the spot where supposedly her house was. It was called the Tabitha School. So, I really felt that history was real. There were wonderful stories connected with history, but unlike the sunflower that followed Apollo, these had real places. And then there were so many layers of history in Israel. It was like all the primitive and prehistoric and then the Islamic and then the Crusaders. It was just like the Grand Canyon, just layer after layer. Well, that was the time I started writing, because I could read by then, but I had run out of things to read, and like a lot of other writers had said, I'd read all the books that I could get my hands on and so I started writing sequels to them. I guess now they call that fan fiction. People want more Harry Potter, so they just write their own and I kind of did that, you know. Also, I would make up these stories when I was going to sleep and they had great details in them. And then I would go to sleep and I would forget the details. I would start all over the next night and I would say well, since I was very into the Wild West, too, it was like, well, but you know, what about the cactus and didn't I have something about the chuck wagon and I thought, well if I just write it down in the afternoon, then I wouldn't have to keep building on it and remembering it, it would stay put. It wouldn't disappear when I went to sleep. So, I started writing these stories on these yellow legal pads my father would bring home from the office and that's probably why I still write books in chronological order, because you couldn't move the pages around. You know, they were all gummed on the top so you had to start at the beginning and it would have to follow in that order, and I guess that's how old habits die hard, because, I do start at the beginning of the character's lives and go forward. I really was entertaining myself and I think there are two kinds of writers. There are the storytellers, which I think I'm one. The storytellers are the descendents of the guy in the cave around the campfire entertaining the people while the woolly mammoth's are outside and he'd better be good, because otherwise the people in the cave are going to drift off somewhere. And then there are the cathartic writers, you know, the people that write because there's something inside them they want to get out. I've actually heard people say I have to write because it hurts so much if I don't. But storytellers aren't like that. Storytellers want to tell -- they have a tale they want to bring to you. I tried to get these children's books published. I would get to the end and I had little watercolors and drawings and my father would send them off to the publisher, like my favorite publisher was Grosset and Dunlap, and send it off to those places and get it back, of course, and nice little notes from editors saying that they appreciated reading it and they thought I had a talent, but just didn't meet their needs right now. [laughs] So, I wrote intermittently, but persistently, through the rest of my life. I'd get very excited about a project and then I'd become monomaniacal about it. I would want to do only that and nothing else. Luckily I didn't want to do it all the time. I didn't lead a balanced life and even today I find it's fairly hard to integrate writing into everyday life. It really is. I mean, I admire those people that say well, I write every morning from 8 until 10 and then I go to the gym and exercise and then I do this and then I do that. It's like it's all compartmentalized, but with me it tended to be like completely taking over or else I was doing something else and not writing at all. So, I could put the writing away and let it sit when I would get finished with one of my sessions and I think that's really good, because you have to let it cool off. You know, you can't even judge it when you've just written it. I tend to write first drafts really quickly, because I think that's what storytellers do. You have the story and you want to get the story out. I call it skating on thin ice where you're trying to get from a beginning to the end and this is really thin ice and you have to skate really fast to get to the ends cracking under you, because you really want to get there and then I will make revisions after that, but I've never changed the beginning until I've gotten to the end, because I think you can polish and polish the beginning and until you get to the end you don't really know what the beginning would say. It took many years until my first novel was published. I kept writing them and sending them off. The "Autobiography of Henry VIII" was the first one that was published and this month is its 25th anniversary in print. We should have a celebration. [laughs] It made a hit at the time, because it put Henry in a completely different perspective. It told the story from his point of view and until my book nobody had done that. It's always his victim's point of view. Like, "A Man for All Seasons" is about Thomas Moore and how terrible he was to Thomas Moore and all the Anne Boleyn things are always about Anne's side of the story. So, I think people are just curious to know what went on in his head and now I'm going to get to my take on biographical fiction. You know, people say why fiction? Why a book? Why not just a non-fiction? Because I think these people, you know what they did, but you want to know why. You want their psychology and I call mine psycho-biographies, because I'd like to try to explain what made them do what they do. Now, to do that, of course, there, again, is the fiction and the imagination. I try to be as accurate as possible and I try to learn everything I can about them that I possibly can, because I can't interpret their motives unless I know a lot about them, but I do not do primary research. I'm not qualified to do primary research. I can't go into the Vatican Archives and, you know, read the Latin texts, and I can't even read Elizabethan handwriting. It's very hard to read it. So, I rely on historians to do that hard work and then I read them, which is the secondary research. You're reading a secondary source. I try to read a lot of them and the reliable ones and if you read enough of them you begin to get your own picture of the character. You can't read just one, because, you know, their biased, too. I mean historians they have an ax to grind. They've made up their minds about Henry or Anne Boleyn or any of these characters and, so, you have to sift through and try to have the lenses that cut through their biases, but you do get a lot of interesting things that way, because one historian will tell you one thing and stress that and another one will tell you something else. I try to go to the places. I think that's really key, to see what it smelled like there, what it looks like. I try to follow in their footsteps. That can be a real challenge, because if the site has been turned into a tourist place, you don't really get much feeling for what it was like in their day. Like, the Tower of London is so filled with beef-eaters and gift shops and little signs and cafeterias that to get the feeling of what it was like in Henry's day or Elizabeth's day, I have gone in January when there are not many people around. You have to go at off-times or if you're really desperate you have to find something else that is kind of similar and another place that looks sort of like it and imagine that's what it was like then. Some places don't exist anymore, like the place where Mary Queen of Scots was executed. Fotheringhay is not around. You can't go to the room where she was executed, but the landscape of Scotland is still very intact and the islands and the castles that she went to. She had a very adventurous, outdoor sort of life, and luckily that's still there. Cleopatra, there is no Hellenistic City left. I mean, modern Alexandria is not like her Alexandria. So, you really, again, have to use your imagination. The Lighthouse of Alexandria is just -- they reused some of the blocks and it's a squat little fort. You know, of course, the harbor is still the same. So, all of this is kind of almost like an incantation where you're trying to infuse yourself with the spirit of it and feel like you were really there. So, Elizabeth, now faced with Elizabeth, how could I have a different perspective? I mean, Henry was easier because he was considered a villain and, therefore, you want to show he really wasn't so bad, but with Elizabeth, you're already starting with people having a positive feeling about her and there's been so much about her, so many movies, so many books, what I wanted to do and I decided to do, was to focus on a part of her life that just isn't covered that often, which is the last 15 years of her life, the Armada on. It tends to, people tend to just stop, movies especially, after the Armada, like that's the great high point, but the last 15 years of her life saw the three major crises of her reign. By the way, she only reacted defensively to crises. They were always generated by somebody else. Unlike Henry, who made his crises [laughs] and made other people react to them, but Elizabeth, the first one, of course, was the Mary Queen of Scots problem. The second one was the Armada, the Spanish invasion of England to try to win it back to the Catholic faith, and the last was the Rebellion of the Earl of Essex, who, as it turned out the last time, the nobleman tried to overthrow the throne. So, all of those, she kind of waited for them to happen. She kept hoping they wouldn't happen. When they finally came, she had to deal with them and her method of dealing with them was masterfully statesman-like, but people don't like to concentrate on that, because they like the earlier things about the princes and the tower and Robert Dudley and all that sort of thing. Also, this was the most Elizabethan part of her reign. You think of the Golden Age of Elizabeth, but Shakespeare didn't even come to London until about the time of the Armada, so all those mental pictures you have of Elizabeth and Shakespeare really didn't happen until the last 15 years of her life. She also was 55 years old when the Armada came. People thought that she was probably going to die soon, not because she was sick, but because, well, nobody in her family had lived much passed that. People didn't live much past that, and they sort of had this program in their mind that well, that's the end of her. One of her great challenges was to keep her grasp on power, because if she had one leading trait it was power. Then you get into all the problems of aging and power. We heard that in the last election about, you know, McCain, was he too old? Well, people were thinking maybe Elizabeth was too old and looking for signs that maybe she was slipping. So, you know, it was a great challenge for her. Now, I'll give you a little background about Elizabeth. You probably may know most of it, but just to refresh your mind, she is a great mystery, although she's supposedly so well known, she's really a public shell with a private person inside of it. We all know the picture, you know, the big wigs, the rough, and the pearls, and so you could identify and outline. You know, she has a great public image, but we always feel she is hiding a secret of some sort. There have been a lot of novels and plays written about the secret life of Elizabeth. Well, that was probably because she kept no diary. She wrote no memoirs, in spite of novelists doing it for her. There are almost no private letters that she ever wrote. There are a few P.S.'s on the bottom of kind of a public letter, usually about some kind of political thing that's been drafted by others. There are a lot of anecdotes told about her by other people, usually showing her wit. We're not sure of how authentic they are. There's poetry that has been attributed to her, but actually none of it is authenticated and some of it really does not sound like her at all. For example, here's one that is attributed to her supposedly as her last serious suitor was leaving. The French Frog, as he was known, the little French prince and the quote is, "Some gentler passions slide into my mind for I am soft and made of melting snow. Or be more cruel love and so be kind. Let me float or sink, be high or low, or let me live with some more sweet content or die, and so forget was love inner meant." Well, this doesn't sound at all like her and considering that she paid 60,000 pounds to get rid of the French Frog [laughs] and sent him back to France, and that was a lot of money, because the whole operating money of the government was 250,000 pounds then, so I don't really think she was melting away with love for the French Frog. Therefore, she -- and I don't think her poetry would be that bad either. [laughter] Margaret George: It's terrible. The French Ambassador said about her, she was a princess who knows how to transform herself as suits her best, and that's part of the mystery. A quick thing about her background, we all know she was the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. What her relationship was with them would be very interesting. A psychiatrist would be busy for her whole life given she lived to be almost 70. Her mother was executed when she was two years and eight months old, so she probably had no direct memories of her mother, and she was very practical, so she solved the problem about what to do about her feelings about her father, like dividing him into two parts. There was Henry the man, Henry the father. We'll never know what she felt about that, but we don't know what she thought about a lot of things. And then there was Henry the King, who she seemed to idolize. She thought he was a great king. She thought that he was a model that she wanted to emulate. And then he died when she was 13 and that left another 12 years before she became queen and that was a very perilous political passage for her, because she had to navigate the tricky waters of the reigns of first her brother, Edward, and then her sister, Mary. Both reigns had factions that were trying to draw her in as a figurehead and she had to extricate herself from this. She had to watch every single word she said. She had to be completely ambiguous and mysterious and everything. So, she survived, but that meant that by the time she was Queen at 25 she was no political novice, unlike Mary Queen of Scots who was so naïve when she became Queen of Scotland. So, when she became queen right away she had two big decisions to make about the direction of the country. One was what religion was England going to be, because it had gone through four religions in 24 years. First, they were regular Catholics, then they became Catholics with Henry as the Pope, then Edward was a really extreme Protestant and his advisors were so, and then they became really far left Protestants. Then, Mary was a devout Catholic, so they came back to the Catholic Church. Now, it was also political, because there was no such thing as separation of Church and State, so whatever the monarch said that the country was, that's what you were. Well, again, Elizabeth was very practical and it had to do with political allies. She wanted to have a Church of England that would kind of be a compromise and keep both camps quiet at least. She tried her best. She was queen long enough that the Church of England did take root, although it never really pleased either side, but the vast majority of people who were in any age were probably not very religious, didn't really care. They just wanted peace. So, the second big decision was who is she going to marry? And, of course, it was assumed that she would marry somebody and she would marry a foreign prince. Then, oh dear, who's she going to marry? If she marries a Catholic then we were right back where we started. England will be appendage to a Catholic country. If she marries a Protestant guy, he's still going to be king, because in those days there was no such thing as the consort. She decided, she took a real maverick decision that she was not going to get married, and all of the reasons for getting married didn't seem very good to her. She knew she wouldn't have an heir, but after all, her father, two out of the three heirs were kind of losers, so there was no guarantee that having an heir meant he was going to be any good and you might be better off to choose your heir, like the Romans did when they would adopt somebody. And then there was, of course, the problem about dying in childbirth and she had no desire to do that. She had terrible marriage examples from her parents [laughs] obviously and Henry's subsequent marriages, so it didn't really seem like something she wanted to do, but most of all she didn't want to share her power, because the Scottish Ambassador, she would always pretend oh I'm thinking about getting married, but not this year, and the Scottish Ambassador said no, no. He said, "You think that if you were married you would be but Queen of England. As of now you are both King and Queen." He said, "Your spirit may not suffer a commander." And that's true. She was autocratic like Henry, just that he didn't have to make a choice. He could be married and still be the king. Now, it also enabled her to employ the married to England symbolism, which really went over very big with her people, because she would say, "I'm wedded to a husband, England. I have poured out my taper of pure virgin wax and sacrificed for you," which brings us to another question that people are burning to know and that's Elizabeth's virginity. For some reason, people are fascinated by this. Henry IV of France, her fellow monarch, did say that Elizabeth's maiden head was one of the three great mysteries of his day. [laughter] Margaret George: He didn't say what the other two were. Well, was she a virgin or not? Probably she was, but, again, for practical reasons, her own psychology about not wanting to give power or not wanting to lose power, also because as a Protestant she was considered the champion of Protestantism, not a title she had sought, but one that had descended on her shoulders and the Catholics already called her an "incestuous bastard born of an infamous Courtesan." So, it was considered that if you were a Protestant you were probably a whore anyway. She didn't really want to give them this ammunition. Also, it enabled the cult of the virgin queen, because when the Virgin Mary, who had been devotees to her for 1500 years, suddenly all the niches were empty in the churches and no more Virgin Mary, but now you have the virgin queen, and so she kind of stepped into that and fulfilled that for people. So, she wore white. She changed herself. Her image changed. She was very clever. She was probably the first monarch modern person to really exploit the image, to know how to manipulate images, know what images to put out, have a certain agenda about what she wanted people to think, and one of them was that she was ageless, and that's because she wanted to keep the power and you got more and more of the fairy queen, the goddess, the virgin queen. Her costumes got more and more elaborate and symbolic to where she didn't look like a human being anymore. You've seen those pictures. Because she was a goddess, goddesses don't age, they don't lose power, they're always there. When she started out you would hardly recognize her. She wore very plain clothes. No jewelry, but that was when she needed to play the part that was going to show her as the plain Protestant princess. Now she needed to be, you know, the Queen of Heaven, the Virgin Queen. But this is all very interesting about her. She is a fascinating character, but I do want to say what made her great. I mean, those things don't make her great, because she wore a white costume and a lot of wigs. Why is she considered? If you took a poll, and I think they have, that she is the most successful and iconic monarch in British history. She built no palaces, so she did not have a great building regime, like Taj Mahal or Hadrian's Wall or anything like that that she left behind. She was very thrifty. She inherited those from her father and was content to live in them. She didn't conquer any lands. England was the same size when she died as when she took the throne and she made no important new laws. There's no Magna Carta. There's no Emancipation Proclamation. Nothing that's a watershed law. Her father did and laws were made after her, but not her. She oversaw no revolutionary change. Again, the big revolution came before and after. Even the Scientific Revolution was not until the 1600's, but her secret was, the thing that's magic and you really -- it's a confluence of events, personality, and just plain luck, probably, she made England a world power. Now, Henry, as hard as he tried, England was still considered kind of a pip-squeaky place and it was a second-rate power. It was a little island off the coast of Europe. It was always a footnote to Europe, but the defeat of the Spanish Armada, which became part of the English National Mythology, suddenly moved England away from this second-rate status to being a world power, plus more important than that, because as we know, world powers come and go and yesterday's world power is today's second-rate power, but she convinced the English people, her people, that they were the chosen people, that there was something very special about these English people. The thing that Shakespeare celebrates in, you know, Henry V in his plays, but how do you get a people to feel that way about themselves. You see, that's the difficult thing. I mean, people are always trying to whip up a morale campaign for whatever country you are, but it doesn't always take the Pope, who Pope VI [laughs], who had actually financed part of the Armada and wanted Elizabeth delivered to him in chains, when they were beaten he said, "She is only a woman, only mistress of half an island, and yet she makes herself feared by Spain, by France, by the Empire, by all." And he also said, "Oh, if only we could marry. How wonderful our children would be. We would rule the world." The Armada and the famous Tilbury speech that she gave when the land army was being drawn up to meet the Spanish if they should succeed in landing, has become legendary. You know, people's use of language then was so magnificent. You didn't have to be Shakespeare. Even the Queen could be Shakespearian and this is the famous one that really kind of encapsulates the feeling about being special and being English. She said, she wrote, this was again, the image, white velvet, a white horse, a little breast plate that she had made specially for her to go over her dress [laughs] so that she looked like she was going out into battle. She didn't put the helmet on, because it would have messed up her wig, so she had it carried on a little pillow. She said, "I come amongst you being resolved in the midst and heat of battle to live or die amongst you all, to lay down for my God and Kingdom and for my people, my honor and my blood, even in the dust. I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king and of a king of England, too, and I think it foul scorn that Parma or any prince of Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm." So, those words ring down to us. Thank you. So, I'm ready to take questions. We have about 10 minutes. [applause] Margaret George: Anything you want to ask, please feel free. Female Speaker: Thank you very much. I'm a huge fan of your books. What is it that makes you decide to write -- it's kind of two questions, actually, to write about a particular character and do you find it easier or more difficult to write about a character or person, such as Elizabeth I, as there is so much history and historical information on as opposed to, let's say, Mary Magdalene who has been shrouded in mystery in many ways. Margaret George: Did everybody hear this? She asked how I decide to write about someone and also is it easier to write about someone that's very rooted in history and has a lot of documentation to someone that is much more of a figure that we don't know that much about. I guess I'm always interested in people who lived operatic lives, larger than life, except they really lived. Maybe that's, again, part of the fantasy, because it allows me to be them for awhile and, you know, I'm just a 21st century American. I wait in lines like everybody else, but when I'm writing about these people I'm different. I think it's probably easier to write about someone that has a lot of documentation, because it's like connecting the dots. You know, it's like you know this and you know this and you know this and you know this and you go from one to the other and you have to imagine how they got there, but you have these sort of stepping stones, whereas someone that's so mysterious, like Mary Magdalene or Helen of Troy, who may not have existed at all, that's much harder and it becomes much more of a Rorschach test about me than the other characters do. Female Speaker: Hi. Margaret George: Hi. Female Speaker: I was wondering, do you find it harder to go more psychological than historical facts that you're reading about when you're studying the characters? Margaret George: Do I find it hard to put the psychology in? No. That's the fun part. Now, that's another reason why, though, I don't do non-fiction. Because in non-fiction, there are many different theories about why somebody acted a certain way and they may list all five reasons. They'll say, well, it could have been this, on the other hand possibly -- when you're doing fiction you have to decide which one rings truest to you. I almost think, well, what would make me act that way? Or what you make somebody I know act that way? There are always a lot of alternative explanations, but fiction allows you to choose the one and, of course, it has to fit with all the other little decisions that you make, because most things they do didn't stand alone. So, if you decide say -- say you have a character and you decide the poor thing has a terrible inferiority complex and he feels bad all the time and he's easily slighted and he's very sensitive, well then, you're going to have to carry that with other situations, too. So, once you decided that that's the interpretation, you're kind of stuck with it. You can't change it around. Yeah. Female Speaker: I'm reading Elizabeth I right now and I read a lot of Tudor historical fiction and what I noticed about your Elizabeth is that she seems very sort of more calm and more straightforward and honest than I've seen her in a lot of other books, so I'm wondering if that's your interpretation of her essential character or if it's more of something you think she developed as she got older, because you write about her when she's older than most people are writing about her. Margaret George: Did you all hear the question? Okay. Well, I think that at bottom she was a very self-disciplined person and I think that a lot of the things people had about the shoe throwing -- I think a lot of it is theater. Remember, she's a princess that can play any part that suits her best. I think she could use her temper to manipulate people or make a point. I don't think she ever lost control of herself. That's just from reading -- in fact, she didn't seem that different from -- that's what's amazing, from a very young age she seemed to be so self-possessed when faced with dangerous situations that most people would lose their head with and over. How she developed this I don't know. It's almost like she was born with it, but I do think that she had external manifestations of, you know, being silly and giddy and losing her temper and that sort of thing. Female Speaker: I actually have another question if that's okay. Margaret George: Yeah. Female Speaker: I read that you have a degree in Ecology and I was wondering if you've ever written anything that had to do with that or if you'd ever be interested in writing something that had to do with that. Margaret George: Well, that's an interesting question. Yeah, I didn't go into it. I didn't have enough time, but I actually majored in Science in college and I got a Master's Degree in Ecology. I love nature and I love animals. I ended up, by accident, at a place that was a hot bed of molecular biology and that kind of science didn't interest me. I became a science writer for a few years for the National Institutes of Health. I think that knowing science helped me to organize things. I'm a very good organizer of facts. I have written a children's book about my tortoise, but that's about as close as I've gotten to nature, writing that kind of thing. It's an interesting thought. I'm not sure what I would do, but thank you. I'll think about it. Really, seriously. I'm not just joking. Yeah. Female Speaker: Hi. So, you clearly like history and you're clearly able to do lots of in-depth research, but you mentioned that you don't have the qualifications to do primary source research, so I was just wondering if that's ever anything that you'd wanted to pursue to kind of be able to go to the Vatican Archives or someplace like that. Margaret George: Well, I'd like to, but I think I would -- I'd have to have so much training. Actually, we do have a friend who goes to the Vatican Archives and, you know, he's like a Medieval historian, but I could never match his, you know, background that he had to have to even get permission to go in there, but it would be fun to do. He told me it doesn't look a thing like the thing in the "da Vinci Code." I said, "So, what did it look like? Does it really have those glass things? Does it really have the stuff that collapses?" He said no, not like that at all. Yeah. [laughter] Female Speaker: I was wondering about your writing process. When you get ideas as you walk around or doing things, do you carry paper and write it down or do you like electronic devices? Because I'm such a disorganized writer I thought I was the only one that would write between 10: and 2:00, go to the gym, and so I wonder if there's a better way to organize it as thoughts that come into your head during the day? And my second question is, what's the most surprising thing you've found out about Elizabeth I? Margaret George: Okay. Well, the first question, I try to keep -- I know this is really low-tech, a spiral-lined notebook, 8 x 11, and I put Elizabeth on it and that's where I put all these thoughts and stuff, because it's not going to go away. They're caught between the spirals and, you know, after awhile you get lots and lots of notes, and if I can't get it in there if I'm not at home, I carry another little spiral notebook in my purse. I told you, I'm very well organized, a little one, and then I'll put the notes in there and then I'll transfer them. But I just don't know any other way to do it. Otherwise, you've got paper all over the place and it's really a drag to try to transcribe stuff that you dictate, because I used to, when I would take car trips, I realized I would get all these great ideas in the car and then, of course, I couldn't write them down because I was driving, so I got a Dictaphone and I would say them into the Dictaphone and that was great, except transcribing them was just a bear. You know, 10 minutes of talking would take me an hour to write it out, so that's not a good answer either. And the second thing, what's the most surprising thing about Elizabeth? Well, I guess that she really did develop a great fondness for the French Frog. She didn't marry him, but originally it started out to be kind of a political thing, then he came over in person to woo her, whereas none of her other suitors had, because it would have been a real face -- they would have lost face if they had gone over and they were a prince and they go over in person to present themselves and the Queen rejects them, so they couldn't do that. But he came over. Well, he was 17 years younger. He had a pock-marked face, a huge nose, and he was a whole head shorter than she was, but supposedly he was very charming and, to her own surprise, she sort of started falling for the French Frog. Then, common sense kicked in later on and she didn't marry him, although she promised to marry him. She took his ring and kissed him in front of all these courtiers, so that she almost let herself go and marry this person who you never would have expected that she would marry. So, that was a very surprising thing about Elizabeth. Female Speaker: Hi. So, is Tudor your favorite -- Margaret George: Oh, over time. Sorry, I didn't see you. I'm so short I couldn't see your sign. Sorry. Well, this will be the last one then. Female Speaker: Okay. Are the Tudors your favorite period of history? Or what would you say your favorite period of history is, if you have any? Margaret George: Oh. Well, it used to be. It started out being Medieval and I guess I'm getting interested in that again, but I like Roman and lately, I hate to say it, I've had an interest in the hated French, [laughs] Napoleon and all that, which I never thought I would, but I just spent some time in Paris, because the French history is so different from English, so yeah, I can feel a creeping interest in the French. That's all. I'm sorry. I did not see your sign. Female Speaker: This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov. [end of transcript]