The Glassmaker
The Glassmaker
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Tracy Chevalier on The Glassmaker
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.
Why she wrote it
A stranger’s tip and a husband’s questionThe book began with a stranger pressing books into Chevalier’s hands after a literary event in Italy. She had no immediate plans for the subject, so the idea sat in a drawer until a domestic conversation gave it a destination.
A reader suggested it! Normally I politely ignore suggestions from others. But after an event a man came up and said I should write about Venetian glass beads, as they were used in trade worldwide and were made mainly by women. He even gave me some books on them. I filed the idea away and brought it out again when my husband asked when I was going to set a book in a place we actually wanted to visit. ‘How about Venice,’ I said, and reached for those bead books.
Reading those bead books produced a second discovery: most glassmaking histories centered the furnace and the maestro, but the record showed a quieter, domestic form of the craft. That gap is where Orsola came from, and it also set the book’s central argument about how long change actually takes.
Glass was a really important trade for Venice…I wanted to write about glass beads, because they were one of the few things that women did make. The thing I loved is that they made them at their kitchen tables, over a little lamp. I just imagined a woman doing that, and she became Orsola, my heroine. Over the course of centuries, she learns to become a really good beadmaker, a maestra…I was curious about Venice, this wealthy center of trade in the 15th century, becoming what it is now. I think most people don’t really know why and how that happened, me included, so I wanted to cover that whole sweep. Also, the fact that it takes that long for women to finally be accepted in glassmaking.
Chevalier has always looked for the version of history that has not yet been written. For a city as over-documented as Venice, that meant finding angles that bypassed the obvious narrative entirely, a principle she applied from the first moment she committed to the project.
I’m looking for the gap in the history, in the story, that hasn’t been told, and that’s the gap that I can fill. [paraphrased from audio]
How she wrote it
Five years, one sleepless solution, one too-vulgar curseFollowing the same Murano glassworkers’ families across five centuries meant losing characters to death every few decades, which risked exhausting readers with new names just as emotional investment built. The solution arrived not at a desk but in bed.
One night I was lying in bed and I just thought, ‘What if they don’t die?’ And so I came up with the idea of time moving differently in Venice from the rest of the world. I did it for a practical reason – I wanted to keep my characters alive for the reader and me – but it soon started to feel very natural to have time flow differently in such a timeless city as Venice.
deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com, “Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb: Q&A with Tracy Chevalier”Getting the mechanics of that time-slip right added years to the book’s gestation. The pandemic compounded the delay, but it also made the novel’s distorted time feel less like a fantasy conceit and more like lived experience. In the Hudson Library conversation, she described lockdown as a period when time had gone strange for everyone: “I almost feel like we lost a couple of years there. So we skipped over time... and maybe that made me feel like I could do it myself in a book.” [paraphrased from audio] Her hands-on research followed the same immersive pattern she uses for every novel, from painting classes for Girl with a Pearl Earring to quilting for The Last Runaway.
I made beads several times – not very well, but I got the idea of how it’s done. And I took an afternoon workshop in glassblowing. It was a lot of fun but scary too as the furnace and glass are so hot. All this was so that I could describe the process more accurately. I always do what my characters do if at all possible, for that reason.
deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com, “Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb: Q&A with Tracy Chevalier”A character who appears only in the background of a fifteenth-century painting became one of the novel’s most important figures. Carpaccio’s Miracle of the Holy Cross at Rialto, completed around 1494, is crowded with Venetian life, and Chevalier noticed one figure the painting’s title makes no mention of.
I saw Domenego in a 15th-century painting by Carpaccio called ‘Miracle of the Holy Cross at Rialto.’ It’s full of crowds by the Grand Canal, and right in the centre is a solemn African gondolier. I knew immediately that I wanted to make him into a character, as a reminder both of the varied Venetian population, and of the tangible presence of the slave trade – which glass beads were a part of.
Her recurring choice to write about craftspeople is something she now recognizes as a pattern, though she did not plan it that way from the start.
I also tend to write about people making things – painting, quilting, embroidery, glass. That too is an accident, but a happy one.
The personal thread
Lockdown and the 1575 plague, two metres apartWhen the pandemic restrictions lifted enough to allow library visits, Chevalier was researching Venice’s most catastrophic epidemic, which killed roughly a quarter of the city’s population. The physical conditions of her own research session made the historical distance collapse.
This became clear when I was researching the 1575 Venetian plague. The lockdown had just lifted and I was able to do research at the British Library, sitting two metres away from others and wear a mask. It was so strange reading about all the things the Venetians did that we did too: quarantines, tracing contacts, quack ‘cures’. By comparison, we had it easy, with our ventilators, medicine, and eventually a vaccine. In Venice a quarter of the population died.
The project of writing about absorbed, skilled makers has a self-reflective dimension she has come to acknowledge. The flow state Orsola enters over a lamp and molten glass is not wholly different from the state Chevalier enters at a desk.
So I think maybe by writing about people making things and getting into the flow, I’m also exploring what I’m doing as well. [paraphrased from audio]
What she wants us to sit with
Five centuries and the question still openThe novel’s five-hundred-year span is not a structural flourish. It reflects how long it has actually taken for women to be admitted to the furnace rooms on Murano, and Chevalier has noted that even today the change is incomplete. Orsola’s struggle with her brother Marco, the glass maestro who dismisses her beadmaking as minor work, carries that long argument forward across every era of the book.
Glass was a really important trade for Venice…I wanted to write about glass beads, because they were one of the few things that women did make. The thing I loved is that they made them at their kitchen tables, over a little lamp. I just imagined a woman doing that, and she became Orsola, my heroine. Over the course of centuries, she learns to become a really good beadmaker, a maestra…I was curious about Venice, this wealthy center of trade in the 15th century, becoming what it is now. I think most people don’t really know why and how that happened, me included, so I wanted to cover that whole sweep. Also, the fact that it takes that long for women to finally be accepted in glassmaking.
The plague chapters bring that long view into a frame that recent readers can feel in their bodies. Reading about Venetian quarantine measures while masked inside the British Library gave Chevalier something she could not have manufactured: the sensation that the past and present were occupying the same room.
This became clear when I was researching the 1575 Venetian plague. The lockdown had just lifted and I was able to do research at the British Library, sitting two metres away from others and wear a mask. It was so strange reading about all the things the Venetians did that we did too: quarantines, tracing contacts, quack ‘cures’. By comparison, we had it easy, with our ventilators, medicine, and eventually a vaccine. In Venice a quarter of the population died.
The comparison she draws is not consoling. It is meant to be disorienting: the Venetians were not primitive or unlucky; they were doing the same rational things, with none of the tools that made survival likely for most of us.