March 11, 2026
This is the third post in “The Research Behind the Story,” a six-part series exploring how award-winning historical fiction writers use travel and on-location research to create the novels we love.
When Tracy Chevalier was writing A Single Thread, a novel about an embroiderer at Winchester Cathedral in the 1930s, she didn’t just visit Winchester. She hiked 25 miles of the English countryside and taught herself needlepoint.
This wasn’t tourism. It wasn’t even conventional research. It was something closer to what actors call method work — physically inhabiting the conditions of the character’s life in order to write from the inside out. Chevalier wanted to know what her protagonist’s hands felt like after hours of stitching, how her legs ached after a long walk through the Hampshire downs, what the light looked like falling through the cathedral’s medieval glass at different hours.
She’s been doing this for her entire career.
Chevalier is an American who has lived in England for her entire adult life, and that dual perspective — the outsider who has become an insider — runs through her work. Her novels are almost always rooted in a specific place and a specific craft, and she researches both by doing.
For Girl with a Pearl Earring, the novel that made her internationally famous, she immersed herself in 17th-century Delft. The novel reimagines the story behind Vermeer’s iconic painting, and Chevalier’s research meant understanding not just the art but the city — its light, its domestic spaces, the texture of daily life in a Dutch household. The sensory detail in the novel — the way Griet describes colors she’s grinding for pigments, the smell of linseed oil, the chill of tiles underfoot — comes from a writer who has spent time in those spaces, touching those materials, standing in that light.
For The Last Runaway, set among Quaker communities in 1850s Ohio, she traveled to the American Midwest and visited the homes, meeting houses, and landscapes her character would have known. For Remarkable Creatures, about the fossil hunter Mary Anning, she walked the beaches of Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast, where Anning made her discoveries, learning to see the coastline the way a 19th-century naturalist would have.
Each novel is a different place, a different era, a different craft. And each time, Chevalier goes there and does the thing.
There’s a practical reason for this approach, and it’s one that every writer planning a research trip should understand: the gap between knowing about a place and knowing a place is the same gap between competent historical fiction and the kind that makes readers feel they’ve traveled through time.
When you read about Winchester Cathedral, you learn that it’s one of the largest in Europe, that it has the longest nave of any Gothic cathedral in England, that its foundations sit in waterlogged ground. These are useful facts. But they don’t tell you what it feels like to stand inside it — how the sound changes as you move through different spaces, how the stone seems to breathe cold air even in summer, how the medieval embroideries in the Broderers’ Chapel look different in morning light than in afternoon light.
Chevalier’s hike wasn’t about covering distance. It was about understanding what her character’s body knew — the fatigue, the rhythm of walking, the way the landscape reveals itself gradually on foot rather than all at once from a car window. Her needlepoint wasn’t about producing a finished piece. It was about understanding the patience, the precision, and the physical strain of the craft her character had devoted her life to.
This is what method research gives a writer: embodied knowledge. The kind that shows up not in the facts you include but in the confidence of your prose — the ease with which you describe a gesture, a sensation, a moment of physical experience, because you’ve actually had it.
One of the things that makes Chevalier’s body of work particularly interesting from a travel perspective is how varied and accessible her settings are. These aren’t remote or exotic locations. They’re real places you can visit, and each one rewards the kind of slow, attentive exploration that Chevalier models.
Winchester — The cathedral is the heart of A Single Thread, and it’s still home to an active embroidery workshop. The Hampshire countryside surrounding it is walker’s paradise, laced with ancient footpaths. A writer researching anything set in southern England would find Winchester a rich base — it’s also the former capital of Anglo-Saxon England, layered with centuries of history.
Delft — For Girl with a Pearl Earring readers, Delft is a small Dutch city that still looks remarkably like the 17th-century paintings that made it famous. The Vermeer Centre is there, and so is the kind of quiet, canal-threaded atmosphere that makes the novel’s domestic world feel plausible.
Lyme Regis — The Dorset coast where Remarkable Creatures is set is one of England’s most spectacular fossil hunting sites, and Mary Anning’s legacy is everywhere — in the local museum, on the beaches, in the landscape itself. It’s also a stop on the Jurassic Coast, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Ohio — Less obvious as a literary destination, but for The Last Runaway, Chevalier researched in the rural communities of the American Midwest, where Quaker history and Underground Railroad history intersect. This is the kind of domestic, often-overlooked landscape that can be just as rewarding for a research traveler as a European cathedral.
Chevalier’s approach suggests a few principles for research travel:
Do the thing your character does. If your character is a baker, bake. If she’s a walker, walk the route. If he’s a sailor, get on a boat. The point isn’t expertise — it’s experience. You’re building a sensory library that will inform your writing in ways you can’t anticipate.
Go slow. Chevalier’s research isn’t about hitting landmarks. It’s about spending enough time in a place to notice the things that guidebooks don’t mention — the quality of silence in a cathedral at closing time, the way a harbor smells at different tides, the sound of wind through a specific kind of stone.
Let the craft lead. Several of Chevalier’s novels are as much about a craft (painting, embroidery, fossil hunting) as they are about a place. If your character has a skill or profession, researching that craft — ideally in the place where your character practices it — can unlock details that pure location research won’t.
Domestic landscapes count. Not every research trip needs to be international. Chevalier’s Ohio novel is proof that “unglamorous” settings — rural communities, small towns, working landscapes — can be just as rich for a writer willing to pay attention.
Next in the series: “Half Your Time Should Be Research” — Philippa Gregory, Geraldine Brooks, and the journalist’s approach to historical fiction.
Stacy Dillon is the founder of Early & Away Travel Company, where she plans research travel for writers, book clubs, and heritage travelers. She lived in Harrogate, England for three years and has a deep love for the English countryside that Tracy Chevalier writes about so beautifully.]
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