Tracy Chevalier: ‘I’m fascinated by what women are allowed to make in secret’

When a fan walked up to Tracy Chevalier in Italy and pressed two small books into her hand, she had no idea it would send her on a journey through the canals of Venice and Murano and lead her to stand before a furnace attempting to blow glass.

Now, 14 years later, her new novel, The Glassmakers, is the result of the years of painstaking research that followed and has just been published.

“I don't normally take my new book ideas from readers, because a lot of people come up to me and suggest things that I should write about,” says Tracy.

“ But in this case, I was in Italy, it was 2010 and so a long time ago, and this Italian man came up to me and said, ‘I think you should write about Venetian glass beads, because they have a really interesting story attached, and they were made by women. And on Murano originally. You might find him interesting - I certainly do’. And he handed over a couple of short books he had written.

“I deal with interesting fans all the time. I'm very polite, of course, but I usually just don't listen to the ideas. And this time I looked at the books and I thought, Oh, interesting. Oh, Venice. But I then put them away, and didn't think about it for many years.”

However, at a loose end after finishing her previous book, Tracy began to search around for a new subject and a new idea to sink her teeth into.

“In 2018 I started thinking about what I was going to write next. And this was stuck in the back of my mind, possibly because I tend to write about people who make things - more and more, that seems to be my angle, or what I'm sort of gravitating towards. It helped that it was set in Venice. Who wouldn't want to go to Venice to research the city? I thought I knew it pretty well as a tourist, but it's very different when you write about it. So I really loved the idea of getting to know it better in that way.”

The result is a novel set in 1486 when Venice was a wealthy, opulent centre for trade. The story centres on Orsola Rosso, who is the eldest daughter in a family of glassblowers on Murano, the island revered for the craft. As a woman, she is not meant to work with glass—but she has the hands for it, the heart, and a vision. When her father dies, she teaches herself to make glass beads in secret, and her work supports the Rosso family fortunes.

In an unusual twist, the Venice of the book exists in its own separate time, where everything moves more slowly. So while the characters of the story hardly age, a hundred years may have passed in the rest of the world, which the book refers to as “Terra Firma”.

The Glassmaker describes the people of Venice and Murano “skipping like a stone” through the centuries, and we follow Orsola and her family as they live through everything from Venice at the height of its powers during the reformation, to the devastation of the plague, Napoleon’s invasion, continental soldiers stripping its palazzos bare, and the transformation of the city from the centre of a trade route to a place for tourists.

“I knew I wanted to start it in the 15th century, because that was the height of Venice's wealth and power as a trade centre,” says Tracy.

“But I wanted to bring this all the way up to the present, because Venice has changed so much, and it's no longer this wealthy centre of trade, it's a tourist destination. I think most people, including myself, didn't really know the history of Venice and why that happened.”

And to tell that story she wanted to concentrate on a family she created called the Rossos, but there was a problem. “I really don't like it when characters die on me when I'm reading,” she explains.

“I've become invested in the character and suddenly have to care about their descendants? I thought, well, how can I get around that? I could have just set it over 50 years, but I wanted to go all the way up to the present. Suddenly, one night, I thought, well, I think I'm just going to have them not die, and so they're going to age in a different way. I'll just skip over the centuries. I'll set each section in a different century and just have them live through that.

“I know it sounds crazy, but particularly with the first draft, I just didn't worry about it. I just did it, and I thought the reader will go along with it. And then it was only retrospectively, especially when my editors started questioning me about it. I thought, well, time moves differently in Venice, because if you've ever been you just feel like you're in a completely different place. It doesn't feel like you're in the 21st century. You're surrounded by 15th century buildings and it's still very oriented around the water, and there are no cars, and for that reason, it has a timeless quality. And I just thought, I can justify doing this, because the time actually works in a different way there. AlI I had to do was, in a way, explain to the reader what's going on, so that you kind of relax… I think it's Marmite. You either go with it or you don't, and most people seem to go with it.”

Her starting point was a real woman, called Maria Barovier, who is known to have invented the Rosetta chevron bead in 1480 and was allowed to construct her own kiln, which was unheard of for a woman.

Maria’s story is included in the book as she helps the main character Orsola learn to make glass beads in order to support her family.

“We know so little about the real Maria,” says Tracy, “It makes perfect sense to have her be a character, so we’re allowed to imagine her. Originally I thought I might write the whole book about her. But then, I thought I would be stuck with Venetian history at that time and not be able to move forward. I wanted to make up someone so I was not limited by a biography or time. All we know, really, is that she worked, and was a member of the Barovier family, and her father, Angelo, was a very famous glass maker. The Barovier family still makes glass.

“They still have a company, and so they were very well known. They invented a lot of different techniques. And very unusually, Maria was allowed to work in glass, and she invented this bead called the Rosetta, which is this red, white and blue bead I describe in the book. It became a very well known bead. Not many beads are very well known and it was very expensive. As a result, she was allowed to have her own furnace, her own workshop, which was sort of unheard of for a woman at that time, or for many centuries after that. So she's very special in that way. She never married. She had brothers who also worked in glass, and that's pretty much all we know about her. So I kind of made up her character of being a bit tough, yeah, and brusque. But I don't think that's a crazy assumption to make, because I don't think she was going to be soft if she was in that profession. I think it made perfect sense that she would be very tough.”

Tracy knew she wanted to explore women who were supporting each other and how they got what they wanted “ in a kind of roundabout way”. Also, she wanted to explore why people made things. “ I'm sort of fascinated by what women do with with their time and what they're allowed to make, and what they have to make in secret or in private,” she says.

Tracy is best known for her novel Girl with a Pearl Earring, which has been translated into forty-five languages and made into an Oscar-nominated film, a play, and an opera. She says: “In general, I'm interested in people making things because I set my books mainly in the past where there was no television, no radio, there was access to books but lot of people were illiterate or people couldn’t afford them. So, what did people do with their time? A lot of it was actually making stuff that they used in daily life. And I like to focus on that, because I think that's what our ancestors did.”

During the course of her research, Tracy ended up having to try all of the crafts that her characters carry out so she could describe them. This involved visiting the glassmakers on present day Murano, but also going to a glass blowing workshop - and handling honey with chopsticks.

“It was really fun and scary!” she exclaims.

“I made three beads, and that was really satisfying, because even though they didn't look that great, it was so incredible to be able to make one. You can make one in about five minutes but glass is a bit unruly when it's heated up - quite hard to control. I did a glass blowing workshop in London and that was just terrifying, because that furnace is so hot! I was wearing these protective pads on my arms and hands and protective glasses. But you get anywhere close to the furnace - and it’s 1700 degrees Celsius. It's just unbelievable. You don't really realise that when you're watching the professionals, because they get up close, they don't even notice it. They're so used to it. I think they just must have asbestos skin, leathery skin, that protects them. But I got up there and went, Oh my God, how do you do this?”

She quickly realised why they asked her to sign a disclaimer saying she would not sue if she became injured.

“You've got this big glob of molten glass that you're meant to be shaping with these paddles. And it's like, oh, God, what if this falls on me? You’re turning it and and you're blowing all at once. It's really, really tricky. I came out of it with a paperweight, a vase and a bowl. But I would say that when my teacher did most of the real work, because I was just turning this thing, going, help, help! But they turned out all right. It made me really, really appreciate the incredible intricacy of the work that is done out there, both both useful stuff and also the more artistic stuff.”

Given the danger of the situation, Tracy says, “they were actually pretty casual.

“They kitted me out with the stuff. But I believe I had to sign a waiver that they were not responsible if I had an injury that sent me to hospital. My teacher kind of grabbed it when it looked close to falling off. But with the beads, I certainly had stuff sort of melt off the little iron rods I was using. And we laughed, because what, what can you do? There were some close calls. I don't think I was ever really in danger, but I did ruin a few things.”

Blowing the glass to make the vase and the bowl was the trickiest part. “When you watch somebody do it, they just seem to do it so easily, and it just seems like they're just almost normally breathing into this rod. But actually, to get the air to be forceful enough to create a shape actually requires a lot of work. So that was, that was quite, quite an education as well.”

The book is also a love story between Orsola and the golden haired Antonio who comes to be apprenticed in her family’s glassworks on Murano. Tracy based his looks

on a painting by Carpaccio of St George slaying the dragon, which she discovered on a trip to Venice in the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni. Tracy says: “ He's this guy with golden hair and is very muscular. He is charging the dragon to kill it. He's on a horse. And there's just something about it that made me think of Antonio.”

Having spent so much time on Venice and Murano, she no longer feels like a tourist there. Once she allowed herself to wander further into the less visited areas of the islands, she discovered inspiration for her characters among the artworks in schools of art and churches.

“There's just too many tourists in Venice now, but they all tend to clump in the same places,” says Tracy. “So you can very easily go into this place and see the Carpaccios, and there won't be anybody else there. So that's one of my tips for people, if you want to get away from the crowds, go into churches and schools of painting and follow the Carpaccios around. There are some in the Academia, and you can see the African gondolier Domenego (one of her characters) is in a Carpaccio painting there, and so are the series of St Ursula. And it's really not that crowded. People tend to go to Venice and stay outside. So I would say go inside, because actually there's a lot of really interesting stuff inside. Then you can go outside and have a gelato and go on a boat.”

Tracy Chevalier is at Waterstones, Cambridge, on October 1 from 6pm. Tickets £8. waterstones.com/events/an-evening-with-tracy-chevalier/cambridge