'A subtle clarity of style, quirky but seldom over-drawn characters, engaging touches of domestic detail and a splendidly vital recreation of Georgian London'
Sunday Times
'Vivid, romantic and pacey'
Daily Mail
'Those who admired Chevalier's atmospheric evocation of 17th-century Delft will find much to enjoy in her vivid reconstruction of late 18th-century London'
Guardian
'Burning Bright is an ambitious, impressively-researched novel…You can almost smell the smoke and mildewed clothes, see the gaunt, pock-marked faces of people struggling to survive and sense Jem's wonder as he gazes across the murky Thames to a perplexing world'
Daily Express
THE INSPIRATION: In early 2001 I went to an exhibition of
William Blake's works at Tate Britain in London. This sprawling display
explored the many and varied strands of Blake's life: his paintings,
commercial engravings, books he printed and coloured, illustrated poems,
and prose and letters describing his radical thinking and bohemian world.
I was familiar with Blake's poems from studying them at college, and his
art from a semester I spent studying in London, but I had never seen it all
pulled together. I remember standing in the middle of one of the rooms,
bewildered by the variety and intensity of his work, and thinking, "This
guy was crazy, or on drugs, or both." At the end of the exhibition, I went
into the shop and bought a notebook with a Blake image on the cover,
thinking, "This is the notebook I will use for my Blake novel some day."
Two and a half years later, I opened that notebook and began taking notes.
I spent a whole year reading about Blake and looking at his work before I
began the novel itself. There is so much written about him it's kind of
ridiculous, and confusing. I think Blake is a bit of a mirror - hold him up
to yourself and you will see reflected in him your own interests and
preoccupations. Poetry, art, philosophy, theology, erotica, politics,
socio-economics: it's all there if you choose to look for it.
Blake's work is not easy to cope with. Much of his poetry is long,
personal, and obscure. His illustrations are dark and anxious. By the end
of the year I didn't understand him any better than I had at the start -
though I did at least come to realize that he was neither crazy nor on
drugs. I kept looking for that one work that would explain him to me, but
after a while I realized I was going to have to write it myself.
The works I kept coming back to were his two volumes, Songs of Innocence
and of Experience - short, simple poems I had always loved and felt I sort
of understood. I decided then that I would focus on Blake's writing of
Songs of Experience - to me the acquiring of experience contains more of a
story than being in a state of innocence. The story of Adam and Eve is
interesting because they tasted the apple, after all; otherwise there is no
story.
Speaking of Adam and Eve, I also kept circling back to a story told about
Blake and his wife Catherine. Supposedly their friend Thomas Butts visited
them in Lambeth and found them sitting naked in their garden, reading
Milton's Paradise Lost to each other. Blake is meant to have said, "Oh,
don't mind us - it's only Adam and Eve, you know!" Scholars dismiss the
story as unlikely, but I love it, as it humanizes Blake. It also made me
wonder what it was like to be his neighbor. So I put that together with
Songs of Experience and came up with Burning Bright.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
