'But I started to commission pieces from writers for the encyclopedias and thought, “I could do that”.' 'Although I always said that I wanted to be a writer from childhood, I hadn't actually done much about it until I came to London,' she confesses. 'I loved England, and I was involved with a guy here.' The 'guy' is Jonathan, now her company-director husband.Ĭhevalier began working as an editor – first on an art dictionary and then on a series of encyclopaedias.
'Can you imagine how exciting that was for three sheltered American girls? Someone had written the words “The Stones were here” on one of the walls, which our landlord lovingly preserved.'Īt the end of the six months her flatmates returned to the US, but Chevalier stayed on. 'The Rolling Stones used to live there,' she says. She shared a flat with two fellow students in World's End, Chelsea. 'It was bright, buzzy, alive – the most exciting place I'd ever been to.' While she was studying for a BA degree in English in Ohio, she spent one term in London and was knocked out by the city. 'We didn't have that many books in the house, so I haunted our local library, borrowing and devouring a shelf full of books on a weekly basis.'
'I was already a bookish child,' she recalls. It was a tragedy that threw Chevalier, the youngest of three siblings, back on her own resources. Her father was a photographer on the Washington Post, the newspaper that exposed the 1970s Watergate scandal, and she lost her mother after a long illness when she was eight. Engraving by Louis Schiavonetti after Portrait of William Blake by Thomas PhillipsĬhevalier is herself a migrant to London.
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