Classics, Historical 

The Glass-Blowers is described as a 'warm, human saga of a family of craftsmen in eighteenth-century France - with the violence and terror of the Revolution as clamouring background to its tragic climax'. As with du Maurier's Mary Anne, the novel is semi-autobiographical; du Maurier's glass-blowing ancestors the Bussons, who lived between 1747 and 1845, have been focused upon.

Du Maurier sets the scene of historic France in a sweeping yet full manner; one really gets a feel for the social disruption and political climate which surrounded the Bussons: 'What a moment to bring a child into the world, that summer of '93, the first year of the Republic; with the Vendee in revolt, the country at war, the traitorous Girondins endeavouring to bring down the Convention, the patriot Marat to be assassinated by an hysterical girl, and the unhappy ex-Queen Marie Antoinette confined to the Temple and later guillotined for all the misery she had brought upon France'. - from Amzon