Burning Bright follows the Kellaway family as they leave behind tragedy in rural Dorset and come to late 18th-century London. As they move in next door to the radical painter/poet William Blake, and take up work for a near-by circus impresario, the youngest family member gets to know a girl his age. Embodying opposite characteristics — Maggie Butterfield is a dark-haired, streetwise extrovert, Jem Kellaway a quiet blond introvert — the children form a strong bond while getting to know their unusual neighbor and his wife.
Set against the backdrop of a city nervous of the revolution gone sour across the Channel in France, Burning Bright explores the states of innocence and experience just as Blake takes on similar themes in his best-known poems, Songs of Innocence and of Experience.
Inspiration
Years ago I went to an exhibition of William Blake’s works at the Tate in London. The show covered many aspects of his life: painting, engraving, printed books, illustrated poems, prose and letters revealing his radical thinking. I had never seen it all pulled together like that. I remember standing in a room, a little bewildered by it all, and thinking, “This guy was crazy. I have to write about him.”
I was particularly drawn to Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience – perhaps because they are a little more accessible than his other writings. I began to focus on his years in south London when he wrote the poems, drew the accompanying drawings, and printed and colored the copies. A possibly apocryphal story from that time amused me: a friend came to visit Blake and his wife and found them sitting naked in a tree in the back garden, reading Milton’s Paradise Lost to each other. True or not, it made me wonder what it was like to be Blake’s neighbor. So I created a couple of families, with two children of very opposite characters (Blake loved opposites), and threw them all together to see what would happen. Burning Bright was the result.
Reviews
Highly pleasing…with a subtle clarity of style, quirky but seldom overdrawn characters, engaging touches of domestic detail and a splendidly vital recreation of Georgian London. —Sunday Times (London)
Chevalier has a knack for recreating the sights, attitudes and spirit of a historical period. —People Magazine
Her pen-sketches of the squalor, smells and sounds of low-life London flesh out the history into immediacy. —Financial Times
Lovingly etched characters and polished prose. —Christian Science Monitor
Entertaining and involving. —Literary Review
An ambitious, impressively researched novel. —Daily Express
