Tracy Chevalier Has a New Muse

Posted on February 27, 2007

Tracy Chevalier, author of Girl With a Pearl Earring, discusses her next book, Burning Bright, with The Independent. Known for including historical figures, such as Vermeer, in her novels, Chevalier's new book includes Romantic poet William Blake as a character. The research for the book was intense.

"I spent a whole year just researching," explains Chevalier, sitting in a London hotel bar eating a sandwich. "Everybody writes about Blake. It took me a long time to wade through enough to realize that none of this was helping me at all."
But getting the details right is fun. And Chevalier enjoys hands-on research. For Burning Bright, she bought a button-making kit and had a go at turning out the Dorset buttons her characters sell. Falling Angels saw her tramping about Highgate Cemetery as a volunteer guide, bumping into another novelist, Audrey Niffenegger, who also had the same idea.
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As a child, Chevalier loved books. "I was not particularly sporty or active. I was quite fat. I used to lie on my bed and read. Also my mother was sick when I was a kid. When I was three she got a heart condition. She died when I was eight." It was the 1960s. "There was no counselling or helping kids cope. None of that crap," she laughs. "Reading was a kind of refuge".
Losing her mother young must have affected Chevalier, but she remembers only a little about her. "If you want a psychoanalytical answer as to why I write, it would probably be that I do it to make sense of loss. There's a lot of loss in my books and a lot of death. Most of my protagonists are quite young. Maybe that's my working through being forced to grow up so suddenly."

Chevalier says that she seems to be writing about all of her teenage obsessions, which included Vermeer and Blake. She says that Burning Bright examines the loss of innocence and how that experience is different from gaining experience. We can certainly see why she would have chosen William Blake as her current muse, then. His Songs of Innocence and Experience would no doubt make a delightful reading companion to Burning Bright, which is available now for preorder at Amazon.com.