This leads him into financial trouble and needs to be rescued by his father. The eldest son, Robert shows a lot of talent as a glassblower but is desperate to be part of higher society. The Bussons were a successful family of glassblowers who produced high quality pieces for the aristocracy. After meeting him and finding confirming who he is, Sophie tells the story of her family and how Robert's son grew up in England not knowing of his family in France. Sophie arranges to meet the man, Louis-Mathurin Busson, having established that he is the son of her eldest brother Robert. In 1841, Sophie Duval receives a letter from her daughter, Zoe, telling of a man she has met who shares her mother's maiden name.
The story is based loosely on du Maurier's own family history, she being a fifth-generation descendant of a master glassblower who had moved to England during the French Revolution. The novel tells the story of a French family of glassblowers, the Bussons, charting their journey before, during and after the French Revolution. The Glass-Blowers is a remarkable achievement – an imaginative and exciting reworking of du Maurier’s own family history.The Glass-Blowers is a 1963 novel by Daphne du Maurier. But crashing into this world comes the violence and terror of the French Revolution against which, the family struggles to survive. ‘ If you marry into glass‘ Pierre Labbe warns his daughter, ‘ you will say goodbye to everything familiar, and enter a closed world‘. The world of the glass-blowers has its own traditions, it’s own language and its own rules. A glass-blower, remember, breathes life into a vessel, giving it shape and form and sometimes beauty but he can with that same breath, shatter and destroy it.’įaithful to her word, Sophie Duval reveals to her long-lost nephew the tragic story of a family of master craftsmen in eighteenth-century France. I will write to you, though, and tell you, as best I can, the story of your family. ‘Perhaps we shall not see each other again. ‘No other popular writer has so triumphantly defied classification.
‘This French Revolution epic is an overlooked classic’ MELISSA KATSOULIS, THE TIMES a writer of fearless originality’ GUARDIAN
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