A COMMON THREAD
Once again, author Chevalier is inspired by historical people and places
A Single Thread Tracy Chevalier Viking
Tracy Chevalier is drawn to the beauty of historical places, so it’s no surprise the author of the bestselling 1999 novel Girl With a Pearl Earring has made Winchester Cathedral the setting of her latest novel, A Single Thread.
“When I’m here, I feel the pressure and the weight of the people behind me,” Chevalier said during a recent visit to the medieval church. “And that’s a good feeling.”
The pressure she feels, though, comes not from the people whose stories have been told, but from those whose stories have been overlooked — like that of the model for Vermeer’s famous painting in Girl With a Pearl Earring.
In A Single Thread, Chevalier weaves a tale about Violet Speedwell, a woman who moves to Winchester in 1930s Britain after her fiancé dies in the Second World War, then falls in love with a married man she meets while volunteering to embroider cushions for the cathedral.
Q How often did you come here to research the book?
A Maybe 10 times. That’s the magic — research and imagination. You’re putting those two things together. I try to absorb the atmosphere of a place. Everyone thinks I lived in Delft before writing Girl With a Pearl Earring, but I spent only four days there, and that was maybe too long — it’s really small.
Q How did you discover the Winchester Broderers, the women who embroidered cushions for the cathedral?
A I thought I was going to write about ... the Great West Window. It’s all higgledy-piggledy. During the English Civil War in 1642, Cromwell’s soldiers came in and shot out all the windows (though the story I like better is that the damage was done by people throwing the bones of buried kings through those windows). People gathered up the glass and hid it until the Restoration, and they deliberately replaced it in this crazy way to remind us of the fragility of both art and the cathedral, of our faith, our lives.
But then I went up into the library and I saw a display of embroidery, about the cushions and kneelers embroidered in the 1930s for the choir stalls. It talked about the hundreds of volunteer women who got together as a group and worked on them, organized by this woman named Louisa Pesel. I had a vision of this quaint volunteer group. Suddenly that’s what I wanted to write about. Everybody looks at the Great West Window, but nobody ever looks at those cushions.
Q I had a hard time putting this book down. And yet the story is really simple.
A Not a lot of car chases.
Q How do you keep readers engaged?
A I don’t tend to be experimental with prose or structure, but I’m quite a visual writer. I have a tendency to imagine a scene in my head and then write it down, almost like a film. Readers respond to colour and light and descriptions. And I like to give daily life its due respect and space. If you overhear conversations, they’re usually about small things, minutiae, and actually we find each others’ minutiae interesting. I just had to figure out a way to frame it so that people would be drawn in by the cathedral or the 1930s or the surplus women idea. Once they get to know Violet, they just want to know what happens to her.
Q Tell me about Violet’s love interest, Arthur the bell-ringer.
A I knew I wanted Violet to meet a man who was connected to the cathedral in some way. I had in mind that he could be a bell-ringer, because I like the idea of them being slightly apart from the rest of the cathedral. Then I watched the bell-ringers practise, and thought, Yes! And I love the idea of “rope sight.” When you’re standing in a circle, you have to be aware of what you’re doing and what everybody else is doing and how you fit in. It’s the perfect metaphor for how we should live our lives. I wanted to call the book Rope Sight, except it sounded like a thriller.
The Washington Post