Girl with a Pearl Earring
Tracy Chevalier, 1999
Historical fiction Contemporary fictionHistoryLiterary fiction
A sixteen-year-old maid in Delft is drawn into the studio of a painter who watches her as closely as she watches the world. Quiet, watchful prose that lingers on light, paint and household tension, moving slowly but with steady pull.
Feels like longing and curiosity. About art and home.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy quiet historical fiction about art, domestic life and a young woman learning to see. Much of the tension stays unspoken and close to domestic rooms and a painter's studio rather than broad historical events.
Why read it
It offers a close, sensory look at how attention and paint can change a household, and at what a young woman notices when others overlook her.
A page from the book
The child who can't invent monsters grows up to look very closely at real things.
Frans, Agnes, and I used to sit along that canal and throw things in—pebbles, sticks, once a broken tile—and imagine what they might touch on the bottom—not fish, but creatures from our imagination, with many eyes, scales, hands and fins. Frans thought up the most interesting monsters. Agnes was the most frightened. I always stopped the game, too inclined to see things as they were to be able to think up things that were not. Tracy Chevalier.Chevalier was born in Washington, D.C., and has lived in London since 1984; a poster of Vermeer's painting hung on her wall for years before she wrote the book.
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Questions readers ask
- Is Girl with a Pearl Earring for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy quiet historical fiction about art, domestic life and a young woman learning to see. Much of the tension stays unspoken and close to domestic rooms and a painter's studio rather than broad historical events.
- What is Girl with a Pearl Earring like?
- Quiet, watchful prose that lingers on light, paint and household tension, moving slowly but with steady pull. Feels like longing and curiosity. About art and home.
- What should I read after Girl with a Pearl Earring?
- If you liked Girl with a Pearl Earring, try The Song of the Lark (Willa Cather), Bel Canto (Ann Patchett) and The Goldfinch (Donna Tartt).
A taste of the feed
Where you keep your real life while you go out and meet obligations.
He believed that life, true life, was something that was stored in music. True life was kept safe in the lines of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin while you went out in the world and met the obligations required of you. Certainly he knew (though did not completely understand) that opera wasn’t for everyone, but for everyone he hoped there was something. The records he cherished, the rare opportunities to see a live performance, those were the marks by which he gauged his ability to love.
Bel Canto · Ann Patchett
A case for wading straight through the worst of it, eyes open.
That life - whatever else it is - is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.
The Goldfinch · Donna Tartt
Maybe a life is not one self but a crowd you keep adding to.
Or maybe a person is just made up of a lot of people,” I say. “Maybe we’re accumulating these new selves all the time.” Hauling them in as we make choices, good and bad, as we screw up, step up, lose our minds, find our minds, fall apart, fall in love, as we grieve, grow, retreat from the world, dive into the world, as we make things, as we break things.
I'll Give You the Sun · Jandy Nelson
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