Tracy Chevalier reveals more about her new book A Single Thread

Two decades after the blockbuster that propelled Tracy Chevalier to the big-time, she turns her attention to the down-trodden single women of the inter-war period in her hotly-awaited new release.

Tracy Chevalier, author of A Single Thread and Girl With A Pearl Earring.

To write a bestseller is every author’s dream — but what happens afterwards? Does the success make it easier, or add extra pressure?

According to Tracy Chevalier, whose global smash-hit Girl With A Pearl Earring just turned 20 years old, you should not try to repeat the formula. “I suddenly had an audience and that is a wonderful feeling,” she says, “But the hard thing about following a success is not to listen to people suggesting I write a sequel or about another art work.

“I have to convince people to trust me and follow my sometimes esoteric choices of subject.”

While Tracy hasn’t repeated the premise of Girl With A Pearl Earring, a historical novel which sold three million copies, set around the Vermeer painting, she has certainly not been short of ideas, with her 10th novel out now.

A Single Thread tells the story of a group of women embroiderers in England’s Winchester Cathedral, in the 1930s. The story follows Violet, one of the “surplus women” as they were known, left single from the First World War and is a blend of historical fact and romance, with a sprinkling of magic.

Tracy, 56, says plots usually come when she is not looking. “Ideas spring upon me suddenly. I’ll see something — a painting, an article about some medieval tapestries — and it will spark a thought that there’s a story there,” she says. “Once I start researching it takes at least six months before I begin writing.”

The American-born, British-based author says she initially went searching for other stories in Winchester Cathedral, but came out with a different idea. “Jane Austen is buried there, there are English Civil War stories involving it, and in the early 20th century a diver single-handedly saved the building by spending five years shoring up its foundations. I was checking out these stories and I came across a huge number of brightly-coloured cushions and kneelers in the cathedral. I found out they were made by a group of volunteers — mostly women — in the early 1930s, and I just knew I wanted to write about them,” she says.

In doing so, she faced the challenge of telling the story of a quietly-determined 1930s woman, without imbuing her with too much modern-day thinking. “One of the hardest jobs of an historical novelist is not letting modern perceptions creep into the characters,” she says. “I had to police myself. It was particularly hard, as single women then were treated with such condescension, their lives so ground down, that I wanted to scream for them.”

The prose, as with all her novels, is fluid and easy to read — which is of course, anything but simple to produce. Tracy writes her books by hand, typing them up at the end of the day. “I like the feel of pen and paper, I feel much more connected to the words than if I’m typing, it’s more organic,” she says.

A Single Thread by Tracy Chevalier for HarperCollins Australia.

“I draft and redraft a lot. Each time I’ll look at a sentence and think, ‘OK, do I need all these words? Is there anything I can cut out?’ Each word has to work for its place. It’s hard, but it smooths the prose out, and that makes it more fluid.”

She says each novel takes her around three years to complete and she comes up with an idea three-quarters of the way through the previous one.

Tracy is already onto her next book, about Venetian glass beads. “This one I sense is going to be a bigger, baggier book, spanning six centuries,” she says. “I still have a lot of research to do.”

With her prolific work ethic, it’s surprising Tracy is also a voracious reader. “I love reading, it is like breathing. I always have a book on the go,” she says. “I am in the middle of Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments. I was worried it would be a flop — sequels can be such let-downs — but it’s genius.

“I also recommend Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House. When I started it I just went, ‘Oh, I can relax, I’m in good hands here’,” she says, which is exactly how a reader would describe her novels.

A Single Thread, by Tracy Chevalier and published by HarperCollins Australia, is out now.

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From pre-war England to the heart of Holocaust Europe. Our Book of the Month for September is The Collaborator, a novel based on a true story by Sydney’s Diane Armstrong — who herself escaped the 1940s Nazi horror as a child.

To get a copy for a 30 per cent discount go to Booktopia and use the code NCBT19; and tell us what you’re loving (or not) currently at the Sunday Book Club group on Facebook.

Originally published as Tracy Chevalier reveals more about her new book A Single Thread