The Glass Maker by Tracy Chevalier

 

Have you visited Venice? If so, you are probably aware of the glassblowing industry on the nearby island of Murano. You may have seen shops selling the art glass as well as the kitchy souvenirs that are made on the island at the present time.

Perhaps you purchased a little glass animal statue or a glass-bead necklace made in Murano. Art beads were invented by a woman in the glass-making trade in Murano (and this real person appears among the fictitious characters in The Glass Maker). Maybe you visited a demo of the ancient craft of glass-making or encountered art glass in museums or antique shops. 

Even if you have never been to Venice, you surely have some idea of the famous canals and the small boats and gondolas used to get around there. Or you may have an idea of the historic buildings and bridges. Perhaps you know about the long history of the city and its former military and commercial domination of the Eastern Mediterranean.

Tracy Chevalier’s current best-seller, The Glassmaker, explores the history of Venice by inventing a family of glass workers who lived and worked in Murano from the fifteenth century until now. In each century, the members of the family age only about a decade, and thus these miraculous individuals seamlessly experience the vast changes of history and the constant decline of the Venetian Republic. Tracy Chevalier somehow manages to make this a convincing story, despite its utter improbability!

The story’s central character, Orsola Rosso, is the main focus of the novel, beginning with her girlhood in a household that’s also a glassblowing shop. The head of the Rosso family and master artisan is first her father and after his death, her brother. The women and younger men were subordinate to them. 

Over time, Orsola teaches herself to make beautiful beads, using the glass rods that were essential in glassblowing. Her craft does not involve blowing glass, but using a flame to melt a small blob of glass and bits of colorful other glass and sometimes gold, to make a cleverly decorated bead: a technique now known as lampwork. Her identity as a skilled worker and her determination to contribute to her family’s livelihood, not simply to do women’s work (which seems to be mainly doing laundry) is a key part of the novel. As the history of Venice constantly changes the way the family needs to live, we learn both the personal stories and the march of history.

The Rosso family must deal with many challenges, including friction and rivalry between the family members, changes in demand for their craft work as the centuries pass, and quite a few hard times. During the plague years of the sixteenth century, they are quarantined with the house sealed off and sick members taken away. History more or less repeats itself in the twenty-first century, when the Covid epidemic is handled in very much the same way, and the characters in the book actively remember their experiences from centuries before. In fact, the way they remember and compare their experiences through the ages is a very fascinating aspect of the novel. It seems utterly impossible but the author makes it work!

Many characters outside the family also play a role in the story, including the dealers, rivals, and customers for the glasswares they produce, and for the shop that they eventually found to sell their wares. Tracy Chevalier has created a very interesting way to present this large amount of historic research and make it relatable. 

The author acknowledges this painting as her inspiration for the character of a gondolier of African origin. He was enslaved by the agent who bought the family’s products, and played an interesting role in the novel throughout the centuries that are covered. The image shown is a detail from a large painting.

I have only read a few of the novels of Tracy Chevalier, specifically, Remarkable Creatures, The Last Runaway, and The Glass Maker. I may read more of them eventually, as I have enjoyed them and learned from them. In 2003 when living in Santa Barbara, I attended a pre-release showing of the film “Girl With a Pearl Earring” based on her most successful book, and it was a very memorable experience to hear a lecture from the film maker along with the preliminary version.

A close look at a decorated glass bead 

from Murano made by “lampwork.” 

— source: Venetian Bead Shop

Review © 2025 mae sander

Books and Movies

Reading

The first sentence of the introduction to The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, which was published in 1912: “This vivid and startlingly new picture of conditions brought about by the race question in the United States makes no special plea for the Negro, but shows in a dispassionate, though sympathetic, manner conditions as they actually exist between the whites and blacks to-day.” 

The book is a fictional narrative of the life of one man, featuring his observations on what it meant over 100 years ago to be black both in the north and in the south (also in Paris and London). I was amazed at how many aspects of the “race question” have remained unchanged. Only the choice of words (“race question”) is different. So much is the same. The book vividly combines the specific events of one character’s life with insights about the way that being either black or white created a person’s opportunities and experiences. The protagonist/narrator is a black man who can pass for white, and thus experiences life from both points of view.

James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) was an author, a poet, a civil rights leader, and a participant in the Harlem Renaissance. His most famous poem is “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which is viewed as the Black National Anthem. Johnson was the head of the NAACP from 1920-1930. His novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man is an American classic.

The latest Detective Galileo novel was a little disappointing to me. The plot wasn’t as interesting or as compelling and the suspense wasn’t as dramatic as in earlier novels in this series. If you are hooked on this series you can’t miss it!

Reading Next

The Glassmaker by Tracy Chevalier: a bestselling author whose books
 I have enjoyed reading

Watching

“A Haunting in Venice” stars Kenneth Branagh as Hercule Poirot along with an all-star cast.

Creepy but a little too contrived.

 

The final episode of  “Vera” is very emotional and nostalgic, but with a good mystery to wrap up a great series. 

Blog post shared with Deb’s Sunday Salon

© 2025 mae sander

Slavery

Personal narratives about the experience of slavery in America and in the Caribbean region were an important influence in the anti-slavery movement of the 18th and 19th century. Fictional treatment of the slaves' experiences also began in the fairly early days of slavery and stories of slavery remain a frequent theme in popular literature today.

The Life of Olaudah Equiano,
Dover edition, originally published 1999

The Life of Olaudah Equiano

A very early slave narrative is The interesting narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, published 1814. It's tough reading the repeated acts of cruelty and inhumanity that the enslaved author experienced and witnessed, but there's a lot of very interesting material in this book.

Olaudah's childhood in Africa was very vividly described, although he was kidnapped into slavery at a very early age. He always speaks of his village in Africa as "we," indicating that he retained a strong sense of his identity. I enjoyed this description:

"Our manner of living is entirely plain; for as yet the natives are unacquainted with those refinements in cookery which debauch the taste. Bullocks, goats, and poultry, supply the greatest part of their food. These constitute likewise the principal wealth of the country, and the chief articles of its commerce. The flesh is usually stewed in a pan; to make it savory we sometimes use also pepper, and other spices, and we have salt made of wood ashes. Our vegetables are mostly plantains, eadas, yams, beans, and Indian corn. The head of the family usually eats alone; his wives and slaves have also their separate tables. Before we taste food we always wash our hands: indeed our cleanliness on all occasions is extreme; but on this it is an indispensable ceremony." (pp. 12-13).

After the author's kidnapping and enslavement, he describes the various places where he lived as a slave in Africa, and then his agony during his time on the slave ship where he experienced the infamous middle passage from Africa. His next life was that of a slave in one of the British islands of the Caribbean. The starvation, the filth, the large number of deaths, and the insane abuse of the human cargo of these ships is haunting, and I have been horrified whenever I have read about it.

Violent and unjust laws that allowed any black man to be impressed into slavery were normal in the Americas at that time, and the author often was nearly a victim of these laws even after he had purchased his freedom from his original owner. In the islands, especially, the law always took the oath of a white man in preference to that of a black man, which meant that free blacks were often treated with great contempt, for example, the refusal to pay their wages after they had completed an agreed on job. The Quakers of Philadelphia were an exception, and were already opposed to slavery and unjust treatment before these were widely held views.

Olaudah worked at several jobs, especially as a skilled sailor, both before and after he was freed from slavery. He traveled to many places and met people from many cultures. I especially liked his description of the feasts of Caribbean Indian tribes -- how they made alcoholic liquor from pineapples, how they roasted alligator meat, and more. Shipwrecks, visits to exotic places, and descriptions of a great variety of work keep the narrative interesting. For example:

"When we had dispatched our business at Cadiz, we went to Gibraltar, and from thence to Malaga, a very pleasant and rich city, where there is one of the finest cathedrals I had ever seen. It had been above fifty years in building, as I had heard, though it was not then quite finished; great part of the inside, however, was completed and highly decorated with the richest marble columns, and many superb paintings; it was lighted occasionally by an amazing number of wax tapers of different sizes, some of which were as thick as a man’s thigh; these, however, were only used on some of their grand festivals. I was very much shocked at the custom of bullbaiting, and other diversions which prevailed here on Sunday evenings, to the great scandal of Christianity and morals." (p. 152)

Details of Olaudah's conversion and how he experienced the Christian faith no doubt made this book more attractive to the audience of his time. Besides his spiritual experiences, he often mentions his dreams, especially his frequent prophetic dreams that prefigure disasters such as shipwrecks and betrayals.

The narrative concludes with the hope that the British government will soon abolish slavery -- the issue was under debate as he wrote. Olaudah Equiano died in 1797, and in fact the abolition law was not passed until 1833.

Washington Black, published 2018

Washington Black

A recent and popular book about the life of a slave in the early 19th century is Washington Black by Esi Edugyan. This is a much more exciting narrative, as you would expect from fiction!

The title character of this novel is born into slavery on a Caribbean island. He has a complex relationship with his master and his master's family. After being taught to read and write and calculate, showing a great deal of intelligence, Washington Black dramatically escapes from  his master's plantation in a hot-air balloon, which was a rare piece of early 19th century technology. He has many adventures in the USA and Canada, and eventually England. This novel is fast-paced and not at all polemical as are the actual slave narratives that I've read. I can see why it's so popular today!

Other Books about Slavery

From my past reading: histories, memoirs, and historical fictions that emphasize slavery, slave narratives, and the role of African blacks in American history:

• Frederick Douglass's Autobiography
• Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" by Zora Neale Hurston
• Out of the House of Bondage by Thavolia Glymph
• The President's Kitchen Cabinet: The Story of the African Americans Who Have Fed our First Families by Adrian Miller
• A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America by James McWilliams
• The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter
• The Last Runaway, a novel by Tracy Chevalier

This blog post copyright © 2020 mae sander for maefood dot blogspot dot com.

"The Last Runaway"

Tracy Chevalier's book The Last Runaway takes place in a very small Quaker settlement near Oberlin, Ohio, shortly after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, but before the Civil War. I enjoyed the historic background of the novel very much, particularly the principal theme of the Quaker community and its struggle with moral decisions about helping the escaping slaves who were passing through their community via the Underground Railway.

I think I enjoyed the book more because I was reading it while driving quite near the area where the main actions took place: we drove the Ohio Turnpike on our way home from our trip last week. I thought about the frontier farmers who were just clearing the area to enable the vast cornfields I saw on either side of the wide, wide road at a speed that they couldn't have imagined at all.

Although I found the characters somewhat stereotyped, the book held my attention, and I appreciated the inclusion of both black and white characters. Honor Bright, the central character, is a committed Quaker who arrives in Ohio from her native England. She accompanies her sister Grace, who is about to marry a man in the small community near Oberlin; unfortunately Grace dies of yellow fever, and Honor must continue alone.

As she struggles to adapt to her new land, Honor has a number of doubts about the moral fibre of the American Quakers she meets. Honor has an unwavering commitment to treating blacks as fully equal humans whose struggle for freedom must be aided at all cost. She finds that the Americans have made compromises to protect themselves from the vicious laws of the land, particularly the Fugitive Slave Act that heavily penalized anyone who refused to help capture an escaped slave. Besides the description of the Quakers' views on slavery and equality of all humans, Chevalier offers a fascinating depiction of Honor's spirituality and Quaker beliefs.

As always, I was particularly interested in descriptions of food, kitchens, and in this book the detail about growing, canning, and preserving food on a small, nearly self-sufficient frontier farm. Some of the descriptions are told in Honor's letters home to England, which make up an interesting part of the narrative. For example, when her only option is living at the home of Adam (whom Grace was to marry), and Adam's late brother's wife Abigail, she found a very disorganized kitchen, which she compared to that of her family in England:

"The kitchen is not so different in principle from that on East Street: there is a hearth, a range, a long table and chairs, a sideboard for crockery and pots, a larder— called a pantry here— for storage. Yet the feeling is entirely different from the East Street kitchen. Partly it is that Abigail is not so well organised as thee, Mother. She does not seem to have 'a place for everything, and everything in its place,' as thee taught me. She stacks wood haphazardly so that it does not dry out, leaves the broom blocking the slops bucket rather than out of the way in the corner, doesn’t wipe up crumbs and so attracts mice, leaves dishes in a jumble on the sideboard rather than neatly stacked. Then too, the range and fireplace take wood instead of coal, so the kitchen smells of wood smoke rather than the deeper earthiness of burning coal. We don’t have to clean up coal dust, but the wood ash can be just as trying, especially when Abigail is clumsy." (p. 75). 

She also described the differences in the crops grown in the vegetable gardens:

"In the garden we are growing many of the vegetables one would find in thy garden, Mother: potatoes, beans, carrots, lettuces, tomatoes. But they are different from what I am used to, even when the varieties are meant to be the same. The potatoes are larger, with more eyes. The carrots are thinner and more tapered— though as tasty. The beans have a smoother skin, and the lettuce leaves grow much faster. Much of the garden is given over to corn." (p. 110). 

At a quilting party, called a "frolic," all the women in the community worked together. At the end, there was a dinner for the women as well as the men who came in from their work, and Honor wrote to her closest English friend:

"As well as ham, there was roast beef, mashed potatoes, baked sweet potatoes— which have orange flesh and taste more like squash than potato— green beans (which they call ‘string’ beans), fresh corn as well as corn bread, a wide variety of preserves, and many pies, mostly cherry, as they were recently in season. I was most pleased by a bowl of gooseberries, which I had not thought were grown in America. Their simple, fragrant taste reminded me of our garden at home in the summer sun." (p. 128).

About the preparation of produce for winter, Honor wrote:

"If thee could see the pantry here, thee would be amazed at the rows and rows of jars filled with all the food from the garden: beans and peas and cucumbers and tomatoes and squash. The cellar is full of potatoes and turnips and carrots and beets, and apples and pears. The cherries and plums are in syrup or dried. We are now making apple sauce, apple butter, and drying apple rings as well." (p. 192). 

Honor also saw another kitchen at the home of Mrs. Reed, a free black woman who lived in town:

"This kitchen was dark and cluttered, full of the smell of hot oil and spices and the suggestion that something was just about to catch at the bottom of the pot. The range was old and smoky, its surface spattered with oil and the remnants of past stews. The shelves on either side of the range were full of open jars of pepper and salt and cayenne, scattered bay leaves and sprigs of rosemary, bowls of dried leaves and twigs Honor did not recognize, sacks of cornmeal and flour, and bottles full of dark sauces dripping down the sides. Overhead hung a string of dried chili peppers that could not have come from Ohio." (pp. 239-240). 

Domestic details in The Last Runaway are definitely an effective way to tell Honor's story. Her efforts to help the escaping slaves mainly involve providing food to keep them going as they head first for Oberlin, and then for Sandusky where they can get a boat to Canada. Mrs. Reed explained how to provide for the runaways as they went past the farm. (Note that Mrs. Reed's dialect is sharply distinguished in the text, while the American white southerners seem to speak standard English. I think this is a flaw in the style of the novel.) Said Mrs. Reed:

“Get you a crate and put it upside down behind your henhouse. Put a rock on it to weight it down so animals can’t get at it. Put you some victuals there— anything you got. Bread’s best, and dried meat. Apples when they come in. Y’all make peach leather?... That kind o’ thing." (p. 185). 

It is for these acts of kindness and helpfulness that Honor conflicts strongly with her Quaker husband and his family.

From the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,
"Appliqued and pieced quilt with star of Bethlehem," 1850.

Another compromise also worries Honor: when she marries, her new family does not share her very high standard of making quilts. Sewing is the most absorbing activity that she engages in, and the descriptions in the book are very detailed. Honor prefers patchwork quilting, making elaborate squares or large patterns from small pieces of cloth with intricate work. The Ohio Quakers use the easier technique appliqué instead -- the quilt I pictured uses Honor's favorite motif, the Star of Bethlehem.

Chevalier did provide me with an explanation of something that had always puzzled me. Here it is:

"They say here that the corn should be ‘knee-high by the Fourth of July’. Ours is much higher than my knee, and I thought it must be doing exceptionally well, until I was told that it meant one’s knee when mounted on a horse." (p. 111). 

I agree with Carol Birch who reviewed the book in The Guardian in 2013 when it was published: "The Last Runaway is an entertaining read. The important themes of the book – slavery and the resistance movement – are, in spite of some moving encounters, unfortunately far less developed than the Quakers and quilting angle. As a period piece on Ohio life in the 1850s it is admirable, but Tracy Chevalier has written far better books than this." (source)

Charlotte Brontë's 200th Birthday Today

Charlotte Brontë Portrait
(from Wikipedia)

Happy Birthday, Charlotte Brontë! I am re-reading Jane Eyre to celebrate, but it's really not a very celebration-friendly book. From the beginning of the book, when Jane is aged ten, she has a strong sense of injustice being done to her, and a strong appreciation of the few people who show her kindness. The semi-starvation of the children in the charity school (where her arrogant aunt sends her) and the death of Jane's friend, who tried to have a calming influence on her, are vivid.

I'm finding reading to be painful -- and enlightening. For example, on Jane's first morning in the school, she and all the children are given burnt porridge for breakfast. Her description of the inedible and nauseating taste of burnt porridge startled me! Jane then learns of the kindness of the school head who arranges for the children to eat a bit of bread and cheese later -- and eventually is chastised herself, for coddling the children by feeding them anywhere near adequately. The reader discovers that the self-righteous clergyman who owns/runs the school is using hunger as a tool to put the orphans in their place.

Out of curiosity I checked to see how the book was received upon its publication in 1847. It was a bestseller, and also judged strongly for its frankness about sex. By modern standards, in contrast, the treatment of sex seems subtle, while the elements of cruelty to children and their deprivation due to the frequent death of their parents are the shocking part. Jane's rebellious reaction to cruel treatment seems normal to me, but not so much to reviewers at the time.

A review by George Henry Lewes praised the realism and innovative quality of the novel. A summary of his review appears on the British Library website. His review, according to the summary helps "to remind us just how great an impact this curious and unconventional novel had on the 19th-century literary and social landscape." Lewes, says the summary: "suggests that Jane Eyre introduced a new kind of female consciousness to the British novel. Reinforcing this idea, Lewes describes Jane as ‘a woman, not a pattern’"

Another website, "Contemporary Response to Jane Eyre," offers several quotes from reviews published soon after the novel appeared:

"The incidents are sometimes melo-dramatic, and, it might be added, improbable; but these incidents, though striking, are subordinate to the main purpose of the piece, which is a tale of passion, not of intensity which is most sublime." (The Atlas)

"Jane Eyre is, indeed, one of the coarsest books which we ever perused. It is not that the professed sentiments of the writer are absolutely wrong or forbidding, or that the odd sort of religious notions which she puts forth are much worse than is usual in popular tales. It is rather that there is a tendency to relapse into that class of ideas, expressions, and circumstances, which is most connected with the grosser and more animal portion of our nature; and that the detestable morality of the most prominent character in the story is accompanied with every sort of palliation short of unblushing justification." (The Rambler)

"Altogether the autobiography of Jane Eyre is preeminently an anti-Christian composition. There is throughout it a murmuring against the comforts of the rich and against the privations of the poor, which, as far as each individual is concerned, is a murmuring against God's appointment--there is a proud and perpetual assertion of the rights of man, for which we find no authority either in God's word or in God's providence--there is that pervading tone of ungodly discontent which is at once the most prominent and the most subtle evil which the law and the pulpit, which all civilized society in fact, has at the present day to contend with." (Eliza Rigby in the Quarterly Review)

I have only begun re-reading Jane Eyre, and I'm looking forward to the rest, though of course I know how it all comes out in the end! I also recently read a newly-published collection of stories reacting to Jane Eyre titled Reader, I Married Him: Stories Inspired by Jane Eyre by many authors, edited by Tracy Chevalier. So I'm very aware of the book's modern impact too.

I assume many articles about Charlotte Brontë have appeared today for her 200th birthday: an interesting one at the Guardian is: "The secret history of Jane Eyre: Charlotte Brontë's private fantasy stories."