Author Glennis Virgo on the ‘wonderful piece of serendipity’ that led to the publication of her novel, City of Silk . . .
There is a portrait in London’s National Gallery of an unnamed Italian tailor, painted by Giovanni Battista Moroni around 1570. The tailor is a handsome young man with a neat beard and he wears an ivory doublet, a narrow white ruff and a pair of magnificent puffed-out breeches in dark red. He stands at his cutting table, shears in hand, about to slice into a piece of fabric he has already marked in chalk. But he looks out at us rather than at his work. It is as though we have just walked into his workshop and disturbed him at his task – and his expression is not welcoming. Perhaps best described as: ‘What do you want?’ It is a painting which seems to summon me whenever I visit the Gallery, and I fell to wondering who the anonymous tailor might be looking at. I found myself imagining a young woman, not much more than a girl, who wanted desperately to be taken on as an apprentice tailor. And that’s when the questions started: who is she? Why does she want to be a tailor? Is it possible for her to be a tailor? What does the subject of the portrait say to her? What happened before – and (crucially) what happens next?
Around the same time that I fell in love with Moroni’s tailor (he is very handsome!) I also became a little obsessed with the city of Bologna. What started as one short city break turned into several, and then a whole month staying at an apartment right in the centre. So my tailor moved from Bergamo (which is where Moroni probably saw him at work) to Bologna. I discovered that in the 1570s it was an industrial hub: a city of canals lined with mills churning out flour, paper and, above all, silk. When I also found out that Bologna, in common with other Italian cities of the time, housed its many orphans in large religious institutions, my heroine, Elena, gained her personal history. And that was it. The story which was to become City of Silk began to unravel from its cocoon.
Writing the novel was something I did for my own pleasure. I have always enjoyed reading historical fiction, particularly those stories which illuminate the lives of the not-so-famous. It is a genre which can, I believe, explore modern issues with the benefit of distance. The research delighted the latent historian in me – and was a very fine excuse to keep visiting Bologna. Today the city has sprawled beyond its original walls but in the 1570s it was firmly bounded by them, as was Elena’s life. I wanted my story to have a strong sense of place and for the city itself almost to have the role of another character. One exciting research discovery was a beautiful and detailed map of Bologna dated 1575, showing every road, canal and church. I must have been the only tourist exploring the city using a Renaissance map! With its help, I found the precise corner where the tailor’s workshop should be (there’s a gelateria there now), the canal Elena needed to cross to get home, the church she was made to worship in as a child.
The writing itself felt to me like a creative puzzle: could I make the characters live? could I construct a satisfying plot? could I even finish the thing? I filled gaps in my skills with some reading and a couple of short courses about the craft of writing. Beyond that, I showed my story to no one and spoke about it little. Beta readers? Not a chance. All I knew was that I liked it. This is notan approach which is widelyrecommended but I believe that writing should never be about following rules. It is an activity which grants us freedom – to imagine whatever we want, and to work in whichever way we want. For me, creating a different world is a very private matter. When the novel was finished, I left it resting on my laptop for several weeks with little real idea of what I should do with it next.
By a wonderful piece of serendipity, Jenny Brown Associates chose that spring of 2023 to inaugurate their Debut Writers Over 50 Award. It seemed to me then (and still does) to be an inspired idea. Those of us who entered our stories for the Award may not have achieved early writing success. But we have years of reading, of manipulating words, of simply living, to distil. And that can produce a very different kind of debut novel. After I sent off my entry, things seemed to move very fast. My novel moved from longlist, to shortlist to winner, and in August that year I received the Award at a party at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Representation by Jenny Brown Associates was the best of prizes.
When my novel went out on submission, I knew exactly the sort of publisher I hoped would choose it: so I was thrilled when Allison & Busby made an offer. As City of Silk moved from agent to publisher, I felt that it was being gently passed from one careful pair of hands to the next. When I wrote Elena’s story it was to please an audience of one – me. It has been so exciting to discover that other people like it too.
(c) Glennis Virgo
About City of Silk by Glennis Virgo:
Justice in sixteenth-century Bologna is like the fine silk which the city produces: something only the rich and powerful can afford.
Elena Morandi is a supremely talented seamstress, at home among the bolts of fabric and cutting shears of her trade. However, she is determined that her ambition to be a tailor, a profession barred to her as a woman, will not slip through from her fingers like thread from the eye of a needle. With luck and perseverance, Elena gains a fragile foothold in the workshop of a master tailor, but then a man from her past crosses her path. Antonio della Fontana has every corner of the city in his pocket and, as Elena knows all too well, abused his position of power at the Baraccano orphanage. Driven to fight for justice against a man seemingly above the law, Elena hatches a plan to get retribution for herself, a lost friend and those still prey to Fontana’s abuses.
Order your copy of City of Silk by Glennis Virgo online here.
