Burning Bright
by Tracy Chevalier
HarperCollins ₤15.99; 400 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤12.79

Why Mrs Blake Cried: William Blake and the Sexual Basis of Spiritual Vision
by Marsha Keith Schuchard
Century ₤18.99; 464 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤15.19

It was not just because of Scarlett Johansonn’s uncannily perfect beauty in the title role that Tracy Chevalier’s bestselling novel Girl with a Pearl Earring, set in Vermeer’s Delft, transferred so well to the cinema screen. The hallmark of Chevalier’s writing is spare understatement and lightness of literary touch. Her readers are asked to recreate for themselves a densely substantial setting to her carefully low-key story. Not a great deal happens. But what does is deftly “placed” in a context we feel we recognise - the bustling market, the pigments we can almost touch, the barely expressed emotions, and above all the muted struggle of hardly significant people against the movements of history. Cinema bodies out her suggestive brushstrokes into sharply lit Dutch landscapes, and peoples them with characters who are reassuringly like ourselves.

In Chevalier’s new novel, Burning Bright, set in London between March 1792 and July 1793, William Blake’s haunting Songs of Innocence and Experience provides the emotional backdrop against which her story is set. Ripples of influence from the French revolution give a barely delineated historical setting. Her pen-sketches of the squalor, smells and sounds of low-life London flesh out the history into immediacy. The bareback riders and tightrope-walkers of the flamboyant, real-life, early circus-owner Philip Astley’s spectacular show contribute further flashes of authentic colour and dash.

The story’s central protagonists are Jem Kellaway and Maggie Butterfield, two working-class young people from sharply different backgrounds, poised on the edge of adulthood at the threshold between innocence and experience. The Kellaways are a Dorsetshire family of country chair-makers, recently arrived in London to begin a new life in the city. The Butterfields are part of the urban underclass, living by their wits: father and son buy and sell anything they can lay their hands on, while Mrs Butterfield toils in the family kitchen, washing and ironing interminable piles of other people’s washing.

Jem’s and Maggie’s stories are given a sense of consequence as they overlap intermittently with the “real” life of Jem’s neighbours, the Blakes. The growing closeness between the young couple, and Jem’s dawning discovery of Maggie’s dark secret, develop alongside gathering clouds of reaction directed against the activities and beliefs of dangerous, revolution-sympathising radicals. The couple’s encounters with William Blake, poet and visionary, sharpen and shape their sense of themselves.

On one occasion, the awkwardly inexperienced Jem and sassy, streetwise Maggie look out of the window of Jem’s house in Lambeth, and catch sight of William Blake and his wife Catherine, naked in their summerhouse next door: “Afterwards Jem couldn’t remember if it was the sound or the movement that first caught his attention. The sound was a soft ‘Ohh’ that still managed to carry up to the Kellaways’ window. The movement was the flash of a naked shoulder in the Blakes’ garden... Maggie began to titter. ‘Lord a mercy, what a view!’”

In Chevalier’s tale, the Blakes’ lack of prurience and simple integrity sets an example for the young couple. As they study the poet’s drawings and sing his verses, they learn the value of both “innocence” and “experience”.

Chevalier is not the only writer to have renewed her interest in Blake as his 250th anniversary looms this year. Martha Keith Schuchard’s Why Mrs Blake Cried: William Blake and the Sexual Basis of Spiritual Vision is rather less coy about the sexual goings-on in the Blake garden - their “happy nudist interludes”.

Schuchard is a specialist in “the esoteric-erotic underground of 17th- and 18th-century secret societies”, with a reputation for uncovering the hitherto unresearched activities and influence of Jewish Kabbalists, Freemasons and Swedenborgians. New documents she has uncovered prove that Blake’s parents belonged to the Moravian Church in Fetter Lane. On this slender evidence she builds a substantial edifice of surmise about William and Catherine’s own religious and sexual practices. Blake was a committed Swedenborgian with a penchant for the Kabbalistic and Moravian strands of erotic spiritualism. According to Schuchard, he was an enthusiast for erotic revelation and an advocate of unrestrained free love.

So, the episode in the summerhouse that finds its way into Chevalier’s novel was, according to Schuchard, one of many occasions on which his discomfited, prudish wife Catherine obediently, if reluctantly, participated in the “sexualised spirituality” to which her husband was committed by his religious beliefs. “According to Swedenborgian standards, such Edenic behaviour was not shocking,” Schuchard insists. Nor would the Lambeth community in which Blake lived have been surprised by such overt sexual activities.

Blake critics have, according to Schuchard, systematically deleted the explicitly erotic elements in his work, sanitising his spirituality into anodyne sentimentality. Some of the illustrations that she includes, photographed under infrared light, show characteristic Blake figures worshipping before rampant phalluses and female genitalia, later erased by prudish Victorian editors. But what added insight she might offer into Blake’s poetry and prophetic books is overwhelmed by the sheer weight of scholarly detail of obscure sects and sectarians, and their more-or-less loony beliefs.

Blake remains a tantalisingly shadowy figure in literary history. His haunting, visionary poetry continues to fascinate readers and critics alike. In the end, I confess, I found more to intrigue me in Chevalier’s enigmatic fictional Blake than in Schuchard’s painstakingly excavated, maverick mind.

Lisa Jardine is centenary professor of Renaissance studies at Queen Mary, University of London.