BOOKS INTERVIEW: TRACY CHEVALIER - World of interiors

Does she enjoy the research for a historical novel? "I like it because I learn a lot. It makes me feel I am filling in gaps. They say, `write about what you know,' but I totally disagree with that. Write about what you're interested in and what you'd like to know about, because writing a novel is a long experience and it can be very gruelling and boring at times. I want something that keeps me occupied and interested."

What has been keeping Chevalier occupied recently is the background to her latest novel, The Lady and The Unicorn (HarperCollins, pounds 15), based on the set of late-15th-century tapestries now in the Musee de Cluny, Paris. Little is known about their original history, and Chevalier's book fictionally reconstructs the creation of these complex works of art, with multiple narratives told from the viewpoints of the main characters.

A nobleman, Jean le Viste, has commissioned a Parisian artist, Nicolas des Innocents, to design the tapestries, which are to be woven in a Brussels workshop. Nicolas gets wildly distracted by Jean's beautiful daughter, Claude, and their mutual passion, helped and hindered by parents, servants and craftsmen, is the underlying story of the book. Along the way, the reader painlessly absorbs information about the technicalities of tapestry- making and the details of a weaver's workshop where procedure was strictly controlled by guilds. Only men were allowed to take part in the actual work; the women were relegated to supporting roles, which does not please one of the book's strong female characters.

The tapestries depict the legend that a virgin can capture a unicorn, which will come to lay its head peaceably in her lap, but they are also rich in layers of symbolic meaning. Five of them (reproduced on the end- papers and dust jacket) show scenes that seem to come from a semi-magical world. A richly dressed woman takes a necklace from a treasure chest, holds a wreath of flowers, shows the unicorn its reflection in a mirror, leads it by the horn.

"The tapestries are about the seduction of the unicorn by the lady," says Chevalier, "but they are also about the five senses. Or are they also about the lady saying goodbye to the senses as she embraces the spiritual life? Is she putting on the necklace when she's about to go off and seduce some being, a man or the unicorn, so is she at the beginning of her sexual life? Or is she taking off the necklace and renouncing the senses? So the book is very much about the different ages of womanhood. Claude le Viste is very young, but her mother has come to the end of her sexual life."

Is she working on another book with an artistic setting? "The next book is going to be about William Blake. It's about the people who live around him and see and hear what he is doing and how that intellectual and aesthetic radicalism affects them ... Blake and his wife Catherine used to sit in the back garden and read poetry to each other naked."

How does she go about the business of creating convincing first- person narratives for long-dead characters? "I try not to let too many modernisms creep in," she replies. "One way of getting round that is to make the words very spare. By doing that it's very much about describing a person physically, and what they're surrounded by, and they are grounded in the everyday and surrounded by the different senses."