Girl with a Pearl Earring

Griet is sixteen when her father, a tile painter, is blinded in a kiln explosion and the family loses its income. She is sent to work as a maid in the household of Johannes Vermeer in Delft, a Catholic house where she, a Protestant, will always be an outsider twice over.

Vermeer notices that she has an eye. She begins grinding his pigments in secret, and eventually sits for the painting the novel is named after. Chevalier builds the whole book around the gap between those two facts and everything they cost: Griet is a servant in a house where the wife is jealous, the mother in law is calculating, and a wealthy patron has designs on her, and her position is precarious in ways she understands perfectly.

The pleasure is in the texture. Chevalier is very good on the physical world of a seventeenth century Dutch household, on the labour of laundry and marketing and the exact grinding of lapis, and on how a painter actually looks at a room. The prose is plain and unhurried and the restraint suits Griet's own carefulness.

It is short and it moves. What lifts it above ordinary historical fiction is that it refuses to make the artist admirable. Vermeer sees Griet more completely than anyone else in her life and does nothing whatever to protect her, and Chevalier lets that sit without comment.

Good for readers who want a historical novel that is genuinely about class and looking rather than about costume, and a reliable choice for a reading group, since the ending divides people.