Gregory's reading life is unusually legible as a formation story — not the vague 'I always loved books' kind but a genuine pedagogical arc you can trace from cause to effect. The Little White Horse at three or four, Georgette Heyer in adolescence, Jane Austen absorbed early enough to become structural furniture. Each stage names a specific gain, not just a pleasure. The pivot is the PhD thesis. Reading more than 100 of the most popular 18th-century novels — Don Quixote, Clarissa, Gulliver's Travels, Moll Flanders among them — wasn't passive consumption. Gregory analysed every one, which means she was learning structure, characterisation, and tempo at precisely the historical moment those tools were being invented. That's not a shortcut to craft; it's the long way round, and the only route that actually works. EP Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class sits at the centre of this account in a way that clarifies Gregory's entire project. A radical history that recovers hidden working-class consciousness — that's exactly what her historical fiction does with women whose lives the standard record barely registers. The Thompson entry isn't name-dropping; it's the intellectual spine of the interview. The Dickens admission is well-observed and honest: she didn't enjoy him until later in life, and the novel she singles out — Dombey and Son — is the right choice for someone interested in social climbing and sentimentality as twin engines of Victorian narrative. It's not the obvious Dickens pick, which tells you she actually went back and read carefully rather than landing on Bleak House by consensus. Iris Murdoch's The Sea, the Sea as comfort reading is the most revealing selection. Gregory describes it with real precision — the vanity, the impossible possessiveness, the retirement-home setting — and the phrase 'a book that is far away from my own concerns and yet entirely about the human struggle' is the most useful thing any reader has said about Murdoch in a long time. Molly Keane as a late discovery rounds out a reading life that has kept moving: an Anglo-Irish novelist whose surface charm conceals a precise accounting of injustice, which is essentially Gregory's method in miniature.
