Though not her first book, Tracy Chevalier shot to prominence with Girl with the Pearl Earring in 1999, a highly accomplished novel narrated by Griet, a teenage girl who becomes maid to 17th century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. The novel is inspired by Vermeer’s famous painting from which the novel takes its name, as Chevalier imaginatively explores the relationship between painter and model. Noting the intimacy of the girl’s gaze, Chevalier thought, ‘I wonder what Vermeer did to her to make her look like that.’ The result of that wondering is the novel, which explores how Griet moves from simple maid to someone entrusted with mixing and preparing Vermeer’s pigments. As she does so, she also mixes up relationships and emotions within the family.
Historical Novelist
Each of Chevalier’s novels is deftly placed at a particular point in history and many of them are concerned with the position of women at that point, embodied in Griet’s invidious position as both servant and muse and Kitty Coleman’s inspiration by the suffragette movement in Falling Angels.
Many of the novels also reveal Chevalier’s interest in other art forms, very apparent in her sensitive recreation of the artist’s studio and practice in Girl with the Pearl Earring, with discussion of commissions, frames, paints and brushes which lead the reader to smell the varnish as they cross the creaking floorboards of Vermeer’s studio.
The 2003 novel The Lady and the Unicorn takes the weaving of battle tapestries in the late 15th century as its inspiration, while The Last Runaway (2013) explores the quilts of the Quakers who opposed slavery and contributed to the underground railroad which helped enslaved people escape from the US southern states to freedom.
With a similar focus on stitching – and perhaps there’s a key relationship between stitching, weaving and narrative – Chevalier turned her attention to the embroidery on cathedral kneelers in the early 20th century in her 2019 novel A Single Thread.
The Glassmaker
Now this year, Chevalier has published The Glassmaker, a novel which deals with the beautiful glass created on the Venetian island of Murano. Her central character Orsola defies gender convention by pursuing the trade as a woman. Here Chevalier does rather different things with history – while the novel begins in 1486 in familiar historical rootedness, it shifts and leaps through time, abandoning logical chronology.
As this review says,
Chevalier admits in her acknowledgments that it took multiple rewrites to make the book’s successive time shifts work. They might easily have felt gimmicky. Instead, she uses them to highlight not just change but all that remains the same.
Craft vs Art
Unsurprisingly, Chevalier has a real interest in these different art forms and in particular, the debate about what constitutes art and how art is distinguished from craft. There seems to be an assumption that art has to be aesthetic only and have no function, whereas if a work is useful in some way, it must be craft. There is, perhaps, a lot of snobbery loaded into such distinctions. Read this piece about how Chevalier weaves her way through this debate.
And here is Tracy Chevalier’s website.
Other Reading
On this blog, we’ve been keeping up with Hanif Kureishi since his devastating accident. Here’s a review of a programme on his progress.
And do you know that the production of a typical paperback book accounts for around 1kg of carbon dioxide? Read this piece about how publishers are working to reduce their environmental impact.