Girl With a Pearl Earring (Wheeler Large Print Book Series) - Softcover

Chevalier, Tracy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1568951868 ISBN 13: 9781568951867

Publisher: Wheeler Pub Inc, 2001

Synopsis

Film tie-in edition of the hugely popular bestseller.

In seventeenth century Delft, a prosperous town in Holland, life was orderly. Rich and poor, Catholic and Protestant, master and servant: all know their place.

So when Griet becomes a maid in the household of the painter Johannes Vermeer, she thinks she knows her role: housework, laundry, and the care of his six children. She even feels able to handle his shrewd mother-in-law, his restless, sensual wife and their jealous servant.

What no-one expects is that Griet’s quiet manner, quick perceptions and fascination with her master’s paintings will draw her inexorably into his world. As she becomes part of his work their growing intimacy spreads tension and deception in the ordered household and even – as the scandal seeps out – ripples in the town beyond.

Tracy Chevalier was inspired by the girl from one of Vermeer’s most loved and mysterious paintings. She has created an extraordinary and moving novel on the corruption of innocence and the price of genius.

About this title

Review

The Dutch painter Vermeer has remained one of the great enigmas of 17th-century Dutch art. Whilst little is known of his personal life, his extraordinary paintings of natural and domestic life, with their subtle play of light and colour, have come to define the Dutch Golden Age. The mysterious portrait of the anonymous Girl with a Pearl Earring has fascinated art historians for centuries, and it is this magnetic painting that lies at the heart of Tracy Chevalier's second novel of the same title.

Girl with a Pearl Earring centres on Vermeer's prosperous household in Delft in the 1660s. The appointment of the quiet, perceptive heroine of the novel, the servant Griet, gradually throws the household into turmoil as Vermeer and Griet become increasingly intimate, an increasingly tense situation that culminates in her working for Vermeer as his assistant, and ultimately sitting for him as a model. Chevalier deliberately cultivates a limpid, painstakingly observed style in homage to Vermeer, and the complex domestic tensions of the Vermeer household are vividly evoked, from the jealous, vain, young wife to the wise, taciturn mother in law. At times the relationship between servant and master seems a little anachronistic, but Girl with a Pearl Earring does contain a final delicious twist in its tail. Chevalier acknowledges her debt to Simon Schama's classic study of the Dutch Golden Age, The Embarrassment of Riches, and the novel comes hard on the heels of Deborah Moggach's similar tale of domestic intrigue behind the easel of 17th-century Dutch painting, Tulip Fever.

Girl with a Pearl Earring is a fascinating piece of speculative historical fiction, but how much more can novelists extract from the Dutch Golden Age? --Jerry Brotton

Review

‘Beautifully written, mysterious and almost
unbearably poignant – a magical experience.’ Deborah Moggach

‘A jewel of a novel.’ Time

'Chevalier's book is a delight' Simon Jenkins, Guardian

Edition details

• Publisher: Wheeler Pub Inc
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1568951868
• ISBN 13: 9781568951867
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English