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  • Girl with a Pearl Earring

  • I thought this was a wonderful story. Tracy Chevalier really brought the character Griet to life for me. I also enjoyed the speculation concerning the "story behind the painting".

    

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• ― Readingrat said on Nov 26, 2007 about the Paperback edition| Add your feedback

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  • I wanted to know more. Who really was this girl. I couldn't stop looking at the actual painting.

    

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• ― LittleBird said on Feb 20, 2007 about the Paperback edition| Add your feedback

A beguiling story about artistic vision and sensual depth that eerily and eloquently re-creates the feeling of the famous painting that inspired it

In seventeenth-century Delft, there's a strict social order-rich and poor, Catholic and Protestant, master and servant-and all know their place. 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. Their growing intimacy sparks whispers; and when Vermeer paints her wearing his wife's pearl earrings, the gossip escalates into a full-blown scandal that irrevocably changes Griet's life.

Written with the precision and focus of an Old Master painting, Girl With a Pearl Earring is a vivid portrait of colorful seventeenth-century Delft, as well as the hauntingly poignant story of one young girl's rite of passage.

"Beautifully written, mysterious, and almost unbearably poignant . . . I read it with a book of Vermeer's paintings beside me and it was a magical experience to glance from one to the other."-Deborah Moggach, author of Tulip Fever

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• Dramahistorical fictionCharlotte Library1961-presentamerican litinspired a movie adaptationTravel