Tracy Chevalier: Bestselling author on her new muse

After her bestseller Girl with a Pearl Earring was published, Tracy Chevalier received an e-mail: "If I were a descendant of Vermeer and could prove it, I would sue you!" The novelist chuckles. "An American. What else?" Even so, it seems harsh. Chevalier never claimed to be offering a biography of the Dutch painter. Her book was an act of imagination inspired by one of his paintings.

From George Eliot to Georgette Heyer, authors have embraced the past as a setting for their stories. If Eliot and others use history as a lens to examine their own period, there are plenty like Heyer offering their readers uncomplicated escapism. But even that escapism is date-stamped. It's like watching old costume dramas - the hairstyles and fashions that once passed as authentic later smack of the actors' own time.

Writing in 1856, George Eliot disparaged what she called the "modern-antique" novel - women's fiction set in ancient times. The kind of "imaginative power" which can "bring the remote past nearer to us" is rare, she argued, because "it demands as much accurate and minute knowledge as creative vigour." Nowadays, there's no shortage of "minute knowledge". And for historical fiction fans, that's part of the pleasure. Chevalier believes that "Just entertaining isn't enough". She continues, "I want my readers to learn something and have a better understanding of what it was like, say, to live in 18th-century England."

With Chevalier's latest venture Burning Bright (HarperCollins, £15), whose characters include the poet and artist William Blake, the available information proved almost overwhelming. "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.

Chevalier's father was born in Switzerland but emigrated to the US when he was five. It's tempting to ask the author whether having a photographer for a father promoted her visual awareness, since all her fiction has some artistic trigger - a colour, a canvas, tapestries, Blake's illustrations. But Chevalier answers, "My dad wasn't arty about it at all. If you'd said, 'Oh, you're bringing up your children with a visual sense,' he'd have said, 'Oh, for Christ's sake!'"

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 had been writing short stories when a newspaper article about UEA's creative writing course inspired her to quit her job. "I wouldn't say I learnt to write a better sentence," she says thoughtfully. What the course did was give her the opportunity to write full time. Rose Tremain was one of her tutors. "It shows, too," she adds, "In a good way."

At the end of the year, students were graded with a comment. Chevalier was working on her time-slip novel The Virgin Blue as part of her MA. So what was Tremain's comment? "'Tracy has a lot of research to do but I have my doubts that she's ever going to get round to it.'" It still seems to rankle. "At the time I was really irritated but now I think it's hilarious. She was right that I needed to research but wrong that I wasn't going to do it."

With each novel, Chevalier has had her own visual totem. For Girl with a Pearl Earring, she chose an orange notebook to work in, and a special "Blake" notebook for Burning Bright. She handwrites passages, which she later types up. "I don't think I could write long-hand from start to finish and I couldn't compose straight on to the computer, either. Hideous. Hideous," she murmurs with feeling.

She remembers how an audience at a talk gave a collective gasp as she held up her orange notebook. "I thought, 'God, they see this as valuable.'" That changed the way she viewed her notebooks. Until Burning Bright, Chevalier would write her prose on scrap paper, which she binned at the end of the day. Now she keeps everything.

The hugely successful Girl with a Pearl Earring was a coming-of-age story about a maidservant who falls in love with an older man, but also a meditation on the power of art with a slightly feminist twist. Taking its cue from Vermeer's masterpiece, this tightly written interior novel focuses on the diffident Griet. Burning Bright is almost the opposite - wide open, busy with characters and the hustle and bustle of Georgian London with its pubs and prostitutes, fog and factories. A family leaves Dorset for the city. The father, a carpenter, takes a job with the circus owner Philip Astley (a real figure) and they move into Hercules Buildings in Lambeth next door to the Blakes.

Griet narrates Girl with a Pearl Earring. In Burning Bright, Chevalier has opted for a third-person narrative. "I thought, 'OK, I've had my adolescence in writing. Now I want to grow up.' I have only written a bit of third-person. I find it difficult. Whose is that voice? Using first-person, the relationship between the characters and me seems much clearer."

Is that because Chevalier feels awkward with the idea of authorial omnipotence? "Yeah. Maybe I'm scared to take that on." She laughs. "I have felt a little bit like a kid in the 'writing world'. I'm not sure how seriously anybody takes me. Some people were kind of condescending about Girl with a Pearl Earring."

Chevalier discovered Blake's poems in her teens. "I seem to be writing about my teenage obsessions: unicorns, Vermeer, cemeteries, Blake," she says. But it was the huge exhibition at the Tate several years ago that brought him to life. "People either love Blake or not. It's like anchovies." And, unlike Vermeer, Blake has a somewhat stronger flavour. Chevalier puts a pretend gun to her head and fires. "What was I thinking?" The novel does, though, revolve around its youthful protagonists Jem, his sister Maisie, and their streetwise London chum Maggie. As in other Chevalier work, there's sex, danger and unwanted pregnancies. But whereas in Falling Angels a straying child is murdered, here Chevalier rather lets her erring characters off the hook.

"It was too easy to have them die", Chevalier argues. "Life isn't like that. You make a huge mistake but then you have to get up in the morning and get on with it." For her, "Burning Bright is about the loss of innocence and what it means to lose it. There's a difference in losing your innocence and gaining experience. Maisie loses her innocence. Jem gains experience. Maggie regains her innocence.

"People ask why I write things set in the past and I say, 'To escape myself, my own boring life.'" But she accepts that historical novels can resonate with our preoccupations and all hers take place in periods of social change. Philip Astley made illusion into mass entertainment. Blake was his spiritual counterpoint, a man out of his time whom, "even if he lived now, you'd think was strange".

Chevalier thinks that there's something "a bit parasitic about taking real people [as characters], but I would never write about somebody whose descendents are alive." Historical figures, however, provide "a skeleton to put the flesh on. It's a short cut to validity. I'm making it easier for myself" - and, perhaps, for others. "I used to go to art galleries and not really know what to make of the paintings", she says. "I love it when people say they look at paintings differently now because of Girl with a Pearl Earring."

Biography

Tracy Chevalier was born in Washington DC in 1962, youngest of three children. Her father was a photographer for the Washington Post. She majored in English literature at Oberlin College, Ohio., then came on a six-month visit to the UK in 1984, met her partner and ended up staying. Working as a reference-book editor, she started writing short stories. In 1994 she took an MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. During this time she began her first novel, The Virgin Blue. Her second, Girl with a Pearl Earring, was long-listed for the Orange Prize and turned into a successful film. Her other novels include Falling Angels, The Lady and The Unicorn and the newly published Burning Bright (HarperCollins). She has dual US-British citizenship and lives in north London with her English husband and their eight-year-old son.