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

Girl With a Pearl Earring (Wheeler Large Print Book Series)
 
Girl With a Pearl Earring (Wheeler Large Print Book Series)
Author: Tracy Chevalier

Book Information
Publisher: Large Print Press
Book Type: Paperback
Large Print: Yes
Members Wishing: 0
Rating:
8

ISBN-13: 9781568951867 - ISBN-10: 1568951868
Publication Date: 1/1/2001


Other Versions of this Book: Paperback, Hardcover, Audio Cassette (Unabridged), Audio CD, Audio Cassette (4.75 hours/4 cassett), Audio CD (4.75 hours/4 CD)

Book Description:
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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Please Rate these Book Reviews

Janet R. (janetar) wrote on 11/24/2008...


I very much enjoyed this book from front to back. I know you will too. Story line made me not put it down until I finished it.

Karen S. (MKSbooklady) wrote on 7/23/2008...


Very good- liked it better than the movie.

Maria V. (mvoss6) wrote on 4/22/2007...


I absolutely loved this book and recommend it to anyone! It is much better than the movie!

Elizabeth R. wrote on 3/7/2007...


used

Hermine R. (herlibrary) wrote on 1/23/2006...


Interesting read.

Karen U. (editorgrrl) wrote on 1/15/2005...


From Kirkus Reviews
Griet is only 16, in 1664, when she\'s hired as a maid in the grand Delft household of Johannes Vermeer, who practices the Catholic faith and has a family consisting of wife, mother-in-law, cook, and 5 children (by story\'s end there will be 11). Griet\'s own faith is Protestant, and her humble family has been made even poorer since her father, a tile-painter, had an accident that left him blind. Hard-working and sweet-tempered Griet is taken on, then, partly as an act of charity, but the austere and famous painter is struck by her sensitive eye for color and balance, and after a time he asks her to grind paints for him in his attic studio--and perhaps begins falling in love with her, as she certainly does with him. Let there be no question, however, of anything remotely akin to declared romance, the maid\'s station being far, far below the eminent painter\'s, not to mention that his bitterly jealous wife Catharine remains sharply resentful of any least privilege extended to Griet--a complication that Vermeer resolves simply through intensified secrecy. Theres a limit, though, to how much hiding can be done in a single house however large, and when Griet begins sitting for Vermeer (his patron, the lecherous Ruijven, who has eyes--and hands--for Griet, brings it about), suspicions rise. That\'s as nothing, though, to the storm that sweeps the house and all but brings about Griet\'s very ruin when Catharine discovers that the base-born maid has committed the thieving travesty of wearing her pearl earrings. Courageous Griet, though, proves herself a survivor in this tenderhearted and sharp-eyed ramble through daily life--and high art--in 17th-century Delft.


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