Tracy Chevalier's second novel, Girl With a Pearl Earring was a January/February 2001 Book Sense 76 pick* and recently topped the Book Sense Bestseller charts.

Chevalier named the novel after a painting by Johannes Vermeer. After owning a print of the painting for years, she became curious about the girl in the painting, about whom nothing is known. In her novel, Chevalier brings to vivid life the girl in the painting, Vermeer and his family, and the details of life in 16th-century Holland.

Perhaps Chevalier writes so well about this world so far from ours because she lives far from where she was born and brought up. After graduation she went to England to live for six months, sixteen years later she still lives there.

She spoke to us on the phone from her office in London (with the poster of Vermeer's painting hanging on the wall in front of her), where she is working on her third novel.

BookSense.com: You live in London, but you're not originally from there, are you?

Tracy Chevalier: I'm originally from Washington, D.C. I moved to London in 1984. I intended to stay six months and I'm still here. I just can't seem to get away! I went over for a junior semester in London and really loved it. After I graduated I didn't really know what to do with my life, so a couple of friends and I came over here for six months and I ended up staying.

I think I'm here for the duration…my husband's English. Also, I think I'm used to being the outsider. There's a cushiness to it because you don't have to take responsibility for the culture around you. You can comment on it or be amused by it, but don't feel that you are implicated -- whereas I feel like in the States, I always have to responsibility for the idiocy of it sometimes! [Laughs] It's a strange thing. But I think I prefer it [over here] now.

The main character, Greit, in Girl With a Pearl Earring, is very much an outsider. Is being an outsider something you wanted to write about?

Yes. I thought that an outsider has an ability to look at something afresh and stirs up stuff. What could have been quite a static household ends up not being static because of her arrival. At the beginning, her family's house was all she knew, that was the base she came from. After she had the experience of living with the Vermeers for a while, going back home was hard. It's a combination of being an outsider and also being 16 -- it's not like anyone talked about adolescent rebellion back then, but there probably would have been that feeling that something was going to change, and she was going to feel alienated from her family.

Is your first novel (The Virgin Blue) about outsiders?

That's out of print here and in England, but the U.S. publisher is going to bring it out again in January 2002. Yes, The Virgin Blue is also about an outsider. There are two stories…there's a 16th-century French Huguenot family who go from being Catholic to newly Protestant, and they have to flee religious persecution to Switzerland, where they are outsiders. (Also, the main character, Isobel, is kind of an outsider of her own family.) It's intertwined with a contemporary story about an American woman who goes and lives in France, and that's very much about the outsider experience of being in a small town in a different culture. She starts to research her family history and discovers this 16th-century family, which explains what is going on her life. I think outsiderness is one of those things I seem to do without even realizing I'm doing it.

Would you characterize yourself as a religious writer?

No, but that's the weird thing! It came up in the first novel, it's come up in Girl…, and I think it's rearing its head in the novel I'm writing at the moment. In none of them did I intend it as an exploration of religion. It's a very 20th-century phenomenon that religion isn't important in our society. If you write anything historical you have to take on religion, it's a part of the social fabric. Changes in religion always bring up stories and ruptures. It's quite a small part in Girl… but nonetheless it is there, underlining, I suppose, different aesthetic philosophies. That's the strange thing -- I wasn't brought up anything. Nominally Protestant, but we never went to church, so it's a peculiar thing for me.

Did you go to Delft, Holland, to research Girl…?

I spent four days in Delft, a couple of days in Amsterdam, and also The Hague where the painting [that inspired the novel] is in a museum. There are a lot of 17th-century buildings still left in Delft, and the structure of the town is still 17th-century based. It's built around a market square, the canal system, and bridges. There are a lot of 17th-century houses around, but there's a lot of the 20th century there: a lot of cars and signs and stuff. You really have to squint to get past that but you do get a sense of [the older city] by being there.

Do you still have the poster of the Vermeer painting, Girl With a Pearl Earring?

Yes, in fact, I'm sitting in my office and it's hanging right in front of me. My sister had a poster of the painting. When I was 19 I visited her in Boston and I saw it and loved it so much. I'd never seen it before so I went out and got one for myself. I've carried it with me wherever I go. It's always hung wherever I've lived, usually in the bedroom, but now she's in the office. Maybe I got her out of my system! [Laughs] It's the same poster; it's really faded and old. There was an exhibition of Vermeer in 1995-1996 in The Hague and I thought, "Maybe now's the time to renew the poster." So I got a new one. I put it up, but it just looked so clean and dark and spanking new, I couldn't do it. I took it down and put the old one back up. I like the old fadedness of it. It's not framed nicely; it's in those white plastic things that you push along the edges and a string to hang it. Maybe I ought to do something in honor of it but maybe that would kind of ruin it if I had it nicely framed.

What kind of research did you do for Girl…?

Once I had the idea, I started researching by reading all of the catalog for the 1996 Exhibition at The Hague. When I research a historical novel, it's a combination of research and writing at the same time, because sometimes you don't really know what your questions are until you've started writing a bit. So I researched a bit, then I wrote a bit, then I researched a lot, and that's when I went to Delft.

That was how I did it with the first novel as well. You pick up a lot when you go to a place. For instance, in Girl…, I didn't know that there was that eight-pointed star in the middle of the market square and I saw it when I was walking around and thought, "that's interesting," but didn't think much more of it. Later on it wove its way into the novel. Things like that you don't really know until you get there. I'm not one of these people that plots every single detail out beforehand. It's a combination of knowing where I'm going, knowing what the big moments are, but also the spontaneity of the daily writing.

In Girl…, you write of the code of behavior in paintings. Is that true?

There were conventions of the time, symbols that are put in the painting to indicate what the viewer is meant to think. In a funny way, Vermeer is much less prescriptive than most painters of that time. What other painters would do -- you'd have scene of a man and woman drinking wine and in the background, on the wall, you'd see a painting of some orgy or lascivious thing going on, and that would mean these two are about to do something…. It's that prescriptive. Whereas Vermeer really was more subtle, he took out a lot of that stuff. Her opening her mouth [in the painting] -- most people at the time would look at that and go, "Wow!" You're not supposed to do that. The way I got around that -- or made it less obvious -- was that he transcended all that because he wanted whatever the best composition was.

Do you read historical fiction?

No, I've never read a Georgette Heyer [author of many historical novels] in my life! I always think I ought to! It's weird because I really was never ever particularly interested in that, but I've found a lot of the books that I've really loved recently have been not set in contemporary times -- like Correlli's Mandolin, or Birdsong, or Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain. I loved all three of those. I loved them for the story. I liked being transported to a different time and place, but I felt what was most important was the psychological makeup of the characters, and what drove them to do what they did.

I see myself in the same way. People ask, "Are you a historical novelist?" It's true that my novels seem to be set in the past, but with Girl… it's set in the past because that painting was painted then. But it's really the painting that I love, rather than the time. If it had been written in 1950s Holland, I'd have written about that. But then if it were painted in 1950s Holland, we'd know who it was, and if we knew who it was, I wouldn't have written about her! I'm a novelist first and the history -- it's really fun, and fun to research -- is really secondary.

Do you write nonfiction?

I was an editor at a reference book publisher and edited encyclopedias of writers, essayists, poets, children's writers and so on. The entries were made up of biographical and bibliographical detail, and a 1,000-word essay on the writer's work. The only time I wrote nonfiction was when the academic -- or whomever I assigned the 1,000 words to -- didn't come up with it so I had to do the odd pinch-hitting myself.

I'm not particularly good at nonfiction, I have to say. I'm a hack at it -- I wouldn't say it's where I feel graceful. It takes me much longer; I sweat over it a lot more than when I write fiction. I hate having to be accurate! Well, I don't mind being accurate in historical and bibliographical detail. In nonfiction I find it really difficult to control my voice. It's strange, but we each have our strengths and weaknesses.

Do you paint?

No. I painted in junior high school, but since then I hadn't painted at all. When I was writing the book, I thought I really ought to take a painting class just to see what it was like. I was really, really not good at it at all! It was very useful to be reminded how hard it is to paint anything, much less a masterpiece like Girl With Pearl Earring. It also gave me an idea what it's like to mix and handle paint. It was another thing I put under fun research. The reading of the big tomes of history is not so fun, but painting, painting class, and going to Delft -- those were fun.

What are you working on now?

Falling Angels. It's a novel set in Edwardian London at the beginning of the 20th century, and it's set primarily in a place right near where I live, Highgate Cemetery, which is a very famous Victorian cemetery where Karl Marx is buried. It's about two families who have graves side by side there who get to know each other. The daughters of the families become friends. It's about their struggle to throw off Victorian values and enter the modern world. A lot of it is about the triangular relationship between the two girls and a little boy who is an apprentice gravedigger at the cemetery.

You just toured the USA…

My voice is gone! I was on the road for two weeks; It was the first time I'd done a book tour. It was riotous! It was quite an eye-opening experience. As a writer you spend all this time in a room writing away, then, when you get out among all these people who have actually read it, it can be quite overwhelming. After a while you meet so many people who have read it, you start to feel that everybody in the whole world has read it, and you lose perspective. But I regained it quickly, and luckily most of the cities I went to I had friends in, and they kept me grounded, which really helped. I'd do a reading then they'd take me away from all the madness! It was fascinating to see who was reading the book. It's a really big book club book, and I hadn't quite realized how big it was.

Across the board, the readings at the independents were better attended, and more atmospheric. It's really about the approach. When I go into a Waterstone's or something over here, there's nobody there I can say to, "Hey, I read this really good book." It's not like that. It's the difference between going to a grocery store, like Sainsbury's, or going to the corner shop, where you know the people. With an independent I might go and say, "Listen, I read this really good book," and then they know that. I had the feeling that the way they got all these incredible audiences was because they knew their readers: so someone would come in and they'd say, "Hey Mrs. Smith, remember how you liked that book about the Vermeer paintings, guess what? She's coming to town to read." Also, they have book clubs that meet there, they give recommendations -- they really have a good sense of their readers. I think their readers are very loyal.

At the chains, they try, but they just really don't know how to do it. I had some big audiences in the chains, but I had my very smallest audience in chains. I was fighting against the intercom system, which for some reason they didn't feel they could turn off, or they stuck me in the music section with music playing in the background, and even though they turned it down, I could still hear it. There wasn't a sense of atmosphere. There was definitely a kind of corporate feel about it. The managers were all really nice. But there was this sense that their job was to put on an event, it didn't really matter who, or what it was, it was just part of their job. Although they were unfailingly nice, that was all it came down to, whereas at the independents it was really An Event.

The best reception I had was in Milwaukee! I was going to all these really big cities like New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and then Milwaukee. My friends were saying, "What on earth are you doing in Milwaukee?" But now I know why: there's this place called Harry W. Schwartz Bookstore and they had 250 people! It was so incredible. I walked in and there was just this absolute zoo in a fantastic way! They were a really receptive audience -- you could hear a pin drop when I read. I wasn't fighting the coffee machine, the intercom, or the telephones. They were just really warm and really into it. I found that just wasn't the case in a lot of other places. It was only afterwards that I really understood better why people tend go to independent bookstores for readings.

Do you have an independent bookshop near you?

Daunt Books (2) in Belsize Park. I love it -- it's a wonderful bookstore. Its major thing is its travel section. They have books by geographical location. They have a fiction section as well, but their major thing is, if you're going to France on holiday, you can get not just guides, but also all the recent and classic novels set in France. It's small and very well thought out, and it's run by a woman who has become a friend of mine. She just knows everybody, she knows what they like. People are always getting her to recommend books. I would never ever go into a chain and say, "Can you recommend me a book?"

If there's a bookstore you go to all the time, word of mouth is very powerful. If you're going to a strange city you need something to set out books from the mass, and that's when staff recommendations can be very useful. In some ways it's essential. I think bookstores are realizing that they can't just lay out the books. Far too many books are published in a year, and those front tables change week by week. You need something that's going to stand a book out and say, "Read me!"

Falling Angels is a Top Ten November/December 2001 Book Sense 76 pick
"Chevalier quietly and seemingly without fanfare totally pulled me into this story, which begins as our characters awake in London at the dawn of a new century, January 1901. For 10 years we follow two families and get totally engrossed in their lives and the changing history unfolding behind them. This is a remarkable follow-up to Girl With a Pearl Earring."
- Laura Cummings, White Birch Books, North Conway, NH

*A January/February 2001 Book Sense 76 pick

"I found the cultural setting and the description of the artist's methods and tools a wonderful balance to this very simple story of love and worship."
- Nancy Hancher, The Bookshelf, Cincinnati, OH

Tracy Chevalier recommends:

Barbara Kingsolver, Poisonwood Bible
Zadie Smith, White Teeth
Sarah Waters, Tipping the Velvet
Rose Tremain, Restoration
Margaret Atwood, Lorrie Moore, Anne Tyler, Toni Morrison

(1) http://www.schwartzbooks.com/
(2) Daunt Books for Travellers, 83 Marylebone High St, London W1, UK (0044 (0) 171 224 2295)

Author photo by Jon Drori.