Book review: Orsola Rosso was born into a world of glittering glass. Renaissance Venice is at its dizzy heights in 1486 as the trade centre of Europe. And on the island of Murano across the lagoon, artisan glassmakers such as Orsola’s family create in their workshops the glassware that Venice is famed for.
But despite her longing to shape and twirl molten glass, Orsola is forbidden from the workshop. Women cannot be glassmakers. They must support their families, cook meals, wash heavy clothing and take care of children. Orsola’s eldest brother will follow in her father’s footsteps to become the maestro of the family business.
But when their father dies suddenly, his workshop is left rudderless, incompetently guided by the inexperienced, volatile Marco. With her mother, pregnant Orsola steals time in the workshop – to create glass beads, a cheap product that no man would deign to make. But to sell, her beads must be perfect. She is only just beginning to master her trade when a compelling new apprentice bargains his way into the workshop, upsetting her composure, and an unrelated tragedy tears the family apart.
Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, published in 1999, sold more than 5 million copies and was adapted into a 2003 film starring Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth. The Glassmaker is her 12th work of fiction, and it’s a confident book worked by an author prepared to take calculated risks. Love, envy, tragedy and passion litter the pages.
The Glassmaker spans 500 years, and the prologue sets the scene: “The City of Water runs by its own clock,” suggesting an unchanging place bound by convention, class and the regulations of artisanship. But the first sentence of the novel itself gives us the book’s structure: “If you skim a flat stone skilfully across water, it will touch down many times … with that image in mind, now replace water with time.” And so Orsola’s family, and Murano, are constant as time bounces by.
Historical novels convince when a story cannot be set in any other period or place and be the same story. The author needs to create a world modern readers understand without smashing the social constraints of history. In this novel, Orsola Rosso and Murano glasswork are the anchor, tied so tightly into this book that they can’t be unwoven even as the novel bridges centuries. Other historical novels, such as Daniel Mason’s North Woods, which follows an apple orchard over 400 years, move from character to character. Not here. At the end of the book, Orsola meets Covid head on, but she’s battled epidemics before.
Her strength lies in understanding her limitations, imprisoned by tradition, class and male rules, and building her own skills without upending her world’s boundaries. Chevalier recognises contradictions within people, and so while Orsola can push back against her older brother and rail against her organised marriage, she does not question her own furious reaction to her nephew marrying out of their class.
Today’s readers expect women to have agency, position and status. Through history, most women were chained to domesticity by constant pregnancy and the care of children. Some authors do gyrations to satisfy reader expectations, using devices such as women impersonating men, the relative freedom of rich widowhood, or lack of family, to give a woman agency. Others concentrate on historical examples: Mary, Queen of Scots, Jeanne d’Arc, Marie de France. Not in this book.
Tracy Chevalier has created a tour de force in Orsola, a determined woman from an artisan background, constrained by the trappings of family and tradition in the richly detailed historical world of Murano, who uses her strength to smash through unseen walls and prove to her family that she can create her own dreams in the Rosso furnace.
The Glassmaker by Tracy Chevalier (HarperCollins, $37.99) is out now.
