Towards the end of Tracy Chevalier’s sparkling new book, heroine Orsola Rosso, a Venetian glassmaker, considers the rearing horse figurines her fellow artisans churn out for tourists. “Why reach for the familiar?” she chides, before acknowledging that she, too, is occasionally guilty of replicating old work rather than creating something wholly fresh. “More and more this was the case as she grew older and more jaded.”
It’s not inconceivable that Chevalier herself, now in her 60s, might have experienced similar misgivings. Certainly, it would account for an altogether unexpected element to this, her 11th novel. The Glassmaker shares much with its predecessors, whose crafty female protagonists – among them embroiders and quilt makers, weavers and printers – are called upon to wrestle with societal constraints at various points in history, from the Dutch golden age to 19th-century Ohio. Like a glass marble’s cats-eye of colour, however, it features a significant twist.
