Tracy Chevalier's new novel The Glassmaker is set in Venice

Whether real or invented, they come off the page as vital human beings in novels that weave together historical events with often marginalised lives.

Over 11 books, The Dartmouth Park author has gone to great lengths for her characters. Trying her hand at embroidery, quilt making, fossil hunting and for her latest book learning to row a gondola and make intricate glass beads.

The Glassmaker follows fictional Orsola Rosso, who lives on the island of Murano where time is slippery and "skips like a stone through the centuries" - from 1486 to the pandemic.

The Glassmaker is published by Harper Collins (Image: Harper Collins)

It was the pandemic that slowed the 61-year-old's research and meant the book was four years in the making: "I thought I would be more productive because I had more time, but I realised during the pandemic how much I need stimulation and variety, people and places, and travel and food," says Chevalier, who divides her time between rural Dorset and North London.

"As a result I was writing more slowly and my plans to live in Venice and do language courses were held up for 18 months because I couldn't get there.

"You can do research online but it's not quite the same as being there."

Chevalier wrote about embroidery in A Single Thread, and quilting in The Last Runaway. As well as inhabiting the same streets as her characters, she needs to "have a go" at what they do.

"I find it easier to write about if I have been to it and done it" she says.

"I don't have to do it well, or be an expert in rowing a gondola, I just want to feel what it felt like."

In the process she picks up vital "little details". During a lesson with a beadmaker she had a hard time handling the tiny glass object and was advised to put honey on a stick and practice rolling it back and forth.

"I consciously filed that one away. You could never have come up with that detail without having done it."

Writing characters who are makers or excel in practical activities is a way to access past lives she says.

"It started because when I was writing about people in the past, I would think 'what did they do in their daily lives?'

"Our ancestors had to do everything themselves, make their own clothes and bread. Recreating those parts of their lives, which loom much larger in women's lives, brings them more strongly into focus. It's a tangible way of connecting and communicating with our ancestors."

She's also drawn to "people making beautiful things, taking pride in doing something practical and beautiful - that's what appealed to me about bead makers, women sitting at kitchen tables to supplement family income.

"I like to write about women, their stories are more secretive, there is drama on the sidelines rather than centre stage. I find that more interesting."

In the novel glassmaker Marietta Barovier, a real life figure who invented rosette beads, sets Orsola off on her craft. Murano glassmakers are male, but the "headstrong" Orsola learns beadmaking to save her family from financial ruin.

While having real people in books is "good for verisimilitude" Chevalier says: "Create a character out of nothing and I can have them do whatever I want. I learn about my characters when I write about them.

"The book is about how women quietly help each other - Orsola has some tough and determined women around her - but in a funny sort of way it's also about the relationship with her brother Marco.

"He is dismissive of her, and of most women. She struggles to get him to respect her and it takes hundreds of years for that to happen."

Wanting to follow both the fortunes of Orsola and of Venice over the centuries she invented a time warp where it passes normally in Venice but slowly on Murano.

It allows the novel to jump from the Renaissance to Casanova, the Grand Tour, the city's occupation by the Austrians who tore down bridges and covered over canals, to the tourist city we know today.

"Time really changed during the pandemic it became elastic and Venice is a timeless place where very little has changed since the end of the 15th Century," explains Chevalier.

"You go there and lose sense of the real world. I was committed to 500 years of Venetian history and this family living through it all. It was unusual and rather fun, playing with time."

The reader can also follow the city's "long slow decline"

"Most of us see this preserved tourist city but don't know why it declined and how that affected the people living there," says Chevalier, who spent her honeymoon in Venice and returns every two years for the art biennale.

"It's incredible that it exists at all, a series of swampy islands where people escaping invaders created a city by pounding timber into the mud.

"The great thing about Venice is it's easy to get away from the tourists who only go to the Rialto and the Square. It's fun to get lost down side streets, then wander and find your way back."

Despite the new tourist tax, she believes the shrinking population, expense of daily life, rise of Air BnB, and replacement of useful shops with tourist kiosks will speed Venice's decline.

"It's unliveable, and it's sinking. I hope this book makes people more aware and respectful of the city so they visit in a deeper way."

Tracy Chevalier talks about The Glassmaker at Daunt Books on November 7th.