What is the plot of "Girl with a pearl earring?" What happen to Griet in the end?

Answer 1

16-year-old Griet lives with her family in a poorer quarter of Delft in the 17th century. Due to her father's accident at a kiln, in which he lost his eyesight, Griet is employed as a maid in the painter Vermeer's house. At first she is uncomfortable, but quickly settles in to her new life.

While in service there, the area where her family lives in is struck with the bubonic plague, and her sister dies. Around this time, she begins to become romantically involved with Pieter, the butcher's son.

Gradually, Griet's relationship with Vermeer changes. He gets her to run errands and perform tasks for him, while keeping it secret from the rest of the household. She begins assisting him, and when the model for his painting falls ill, she takes the model's place.

Meanwhile, Vermeer's wealthy but licentious patron, van Ruijven, notices her and pressures Vermeer to paint them together sitting together. Griet and Vermeer are reluctant to acquiesce, due the the scandal caused last time van Ruijven was painted with a girl. Eventually, Vermeer compromises and just paints Griet by herself. However, he makes her wear his wife's pearl earrings. When she finds out, Griet is forced to leave.

Ten years later, married to Pieter with two children, she is called back to the house. Vermeer is dead, and as part of his last wishes, she receives the two pearl earrings, which she then pawns, finally settling the debt between the butcher shop and the Vermeers. [This plot summary needs to explain the nature of this debt, and why would Griet settle it when she hereself is of humble condition.]

Answer 2

Girl In Hyacinth Blue Summary

Answer 3

The scant confirmed facts about the life of Vermeer, and the relative paucity of his masterworks, continues to be provoke to the literary imagination, as witnessed by this third fine fictional work on the Dutch artist in the space of 13 months. Not as erotic or as deviously suspenseful as Katharine Weber's The Music Lesson, or as original in conception as Susan Vreeland's interlinked short stories, Girl in Hyacinth Blue, Chevalier's first novel succeeds on its own merits. Through the eyes of its protagonist, the modest daughter of a tile maker who in 1664 is forced to work as a maid in the Vermeer household because her father has gone blind, Chevalier presents a marvelously textured picture of 17th-century Delft. The physical appearance of the city is clearly delineated, as is its rigidly defined class system, the grinding poverty of the working people and the prejudice against Catholics among the Protestant majority. From the very first, 16-year-old narrator Griet establishes herself as a keen observer who sees the world in sensuous images, expressed in precise and luminous prose. Through her vision, the personalities of coolly distant Vermeer, his emotionally volatile wife, Catharina, his sharp-eyed and benevolently powerful mother-in-law, Maria Thins, and his increasing brood of children are traced with subtle shading, and the strains and jealousies within the household potently conveyed. With equal skill, Chevalier describes the components of a painting: how colors are mixed from apothecary materials, how the composition of a work is achieved with painstaking care. She also excels in conveying the inflexible class system, making it clear that to members of the wealthy elite, every member of the servant class is expendable. Griet is almost ruined when Vermeer, impressed by her instinctive grasp of color and composition, secretly makes her his assistant, and later demands that she pose for him wearing Catharina's pearl earrings.

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