Tracy chevalier why i write

All this is dispersed with fascinating details about ancestral research and what it is like to live as an outsider in small-town France, along with a few pithy criticisms of national stereotypes and some marvellous descriptions of the contrasts between the French and Swiss countryside. The novel opens at the beginning of , just after the death of Queen Victoria, a time of great social ferment in England. It follows the fortunes of two middle class families who live in the same street and have their family graves in the same cemetery.

Much of the action takes place in and around the cemetery and the novel offers fascinating insights into the Victorian and Edwardian obsession with grief, mourning and death, including details about gravedigging, the administration of cemeteries, funerary architecture and the etiquette of mourning, such as the types of clothes to be worn during and after the funeral.

Lavinia Waterhouse, the year-old daughter of one of the families, writes a manual, for example, where she records the very strict social rules concerning a death in the family that were to be followed by any self-respecting 'decent' family of the time. Modern readers will be surprised to find out the length of mourning for various relatives was: for a husband — 2 years; for a child or a mother — 1 year; for brothers and sisters — 6 months; for grandparents — 6 months; uncles and aunts — 2 months; great-uncles and great-aunts — 6 weeks; first cousins — 4 weeks; second cousins — 3 weeks.

They might also be surprised to discover that cremation, a common practice nowadays, was only just coming into fashion at the turn of the century and was still thought by many to be an unnatural, heathen practice. It is set in the last decade of the s and revolves around the creation of a series of tapestries known as the Lady and the Unicorn which are now in the Museum of the Middle Ages in Cluny, Paris. The action of the novel moves between Paris, home of the nouveau riche nobleman who commissions the tapestry and the arrogant, promiscuous artist Nicholas des Innocents whom he engages to do the original drawings, and the workshop in Brussels where the master-weaver Georges de la Chapelle and his household spend two years of their lives executing the tapestries.

Yet again, Chevalier proves to have a strong eye for detail and a marked talent for explaining to her audience the differences in behaviour and expectations of the various social classes of the time.

She also opens up for the layman the fascinating world of tapestry making — of how the wool is spun and dyed, of how it is mounted and worked on the frames and how the weavers work on just one section at a time, not seeing the whole picture until the 'cutting off', a day of great celebration.

The moody lighting doesn't help either! Standing in fr… 4 days ago. We want to know! We publish a Literature Newsletter when we have news and features on UK and international literature, plus opportunities for the industry to share.

Covid update London-based courses to return this autumn, with safety still our top concern — find out more here. Welcome to the next in our series of Curtis Brown blog posts, these blogs include exclusive interviews with authors, agents and publishers; writing tips; industry insights — and much more besides. This week we are rather excited to be talking to Tracy Chevalier. Here Tracy talks about some of her favourite novels, and the importance of writing every day….

Tell us about finding Jonny Geller as your agent and the road to publication for your debut novel, The Virgin Blue. Perhaps Enemy Women by Paulette Jiles. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. More recently, The Outcast by Sadie Jones.

If you could tell your younger self one piece of advice, what would it be? Focus on those, and relax about the accidents. What tips would you give to aspiring writers? It seemed perfectly clear that it should be from her point of view.

My latest book, Remarkable Creatures , is particularly about a woman named Mary Anning , the fossil hunter, but I knew I wanted there to be a different perspective. So I wanted two sides of the argument, and I found out that Mary had this friend who was a middle-class woman twenty years her senior, named Elizabeth Philpot. It made perfect sense to have the two of them tell the story and get a more complete picture. Sometimes it takes a lot of fiddling around, or rewriting a whole draft from a different point of view.

Mary Anning is very much center stage in Remarkable Creatures. Was it a constraint to write about a real person, about whom quite a lot is known? It was both an advantage and a disadvantage. I had to fudge the chronology a little bit, more in this book than in other books. This is outrageous! She used to go out on the beach every day, and the same things would happen year after year. So in the first draft I kept all the dates, then I put it all together and thought, oh, this drags a bit—who needs to know that this happened and then there were three or four years before that happened?

It was an incredible liberation. There are three dates that are mentioned, one on which an auction takes place, one when she finds an ichthyosaur , and one when she finds a plesiosaur. I think those are the only specific dates in the book. Everything else is kind of a mishmash. More or less. So for The Virgin Blue , my first novel, I had the idea and did a bit of research, and then I went down to southern France and found a town for Ella, the contemporary character, to live in.

I actually rented a car at Toulouse airport and then drove with a map and went into all these small towns. I start to write without having completed the research, because once you start writing, it opens up a lot of other questions that you need to do research on, and so I feel like my research process is never complete. How do you use your research, which might be quite dry and academic, and bring it to life the way you do?

I put the story first, and the characters. The history always has to be secondary. That sorting gives me the confidence to set something during a particular period. You took painting classes when you were writing Girl with a Pearl Earring and you went to a tapestry studio for The Lady and the Unicorn. Apart from looking on the beach for fossils, what did you do for Remarkable Creatures? Mary and Elizabeth were very interested in fossils, that was their obsession, and so I had to spend a long time on the beach, looking.

I had to go a lot. I spent a lot of time looking at them. Other than that, Elizabeth Philpot collected a lot of fossil fish, and when she died her nephew gave her collection to the Natural History Museum in Oxford. They have her stuff in all these big trays in back rooms, and I spent a very happy day pulling them out and looking. I always love the hands-on, not just doing but also feeling. William Blake had a notebook that he used to write his poems in.