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By Lily Schatz

Last Monday, one of Oberlin’s most prominent alumni authors, Tracy Chevalier, returned to campus to speak with students and to read from both her best-selling novel Girl with a Pearl Earring and her latest book, The Lady and the Unicorn.

After graduating from Oberlin in 1985, Chevalier found herself in England, where she worked as a reference book editor for several years. Chevalier then left her job and, after completing a year-long master’s program in creative writing at the University of East Anglia, embarked on a writing career. Over the past five years, she has published four novels. Girl with a Pearl Earring, her most successful book, has been made into a movie that is due for release next month. The novel was inspired by a painting of the same name by the enigmatic Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer.

Chevalier’s most recent work, The Lady and the Unicorn, is due for domestic release in January 2004. Like Girl with a Pearl Earring, The Lady and the Unicorn is based on an artwork, in this case a series of six tapestries, made in France at the end of the fifteenth century, which now hang in the Cluny Museum in Paris. The novel, set in Europe during the early 1490s, tells the story of how the tapestries were made and how the lives of the tapestry makers were influenced by their creation, as well as by one another.

Chevalier first saw the Cluny tapestries when she was 20, but had forgotten about them until recently when she came across a beautifully-illustrated magazine article. Chevalier recalls, “I looked at them and I thought, I have got to write about these. I just knew right away.” There is a lot of mystery surrounding the tapestries; it is unknown who made them or why. “That just rang a lot of bells with me because I seem to be specializing in finding out and coming up with the stories behind artwork,” Chevalier said.

The inspiration for much of Chevalier’s work dates back to her college days, although she had no idea that she would become a writer at the time. “As a teenager I had sort of a unicorn craze which extended into my Oberlin years. My freshman year I had a poster of a unicorn…Funny enough, my sophomore year, fall break, I went to visit my sister in Boston and saw a picture of Girl with a Pearl Earring on her wall and went out and bought a poster of that, went back to my dorm room, took down the unicorn and put up the girl.”

Girl with a Pearl Earring has been made into a film starring Scarlett Johannson (Lost in Translation) as Griet and Colin Firth (Pride and Prejudice) as Vermeer. When her agent first approached her about the possibility of having her novel made into a film, Chevalier had no idea her book would gain such popularity.

“I thought it was going to sell a thousand copies and die a quiet death.” She told her agent, “Yes, but please don’t go anywhere near Hollywood.” Chevalier commented,
“The reason I didn’t want Hollywood to make the movie is that they haven’t realized yet how to make a subtle film.”

The author was given the opportunity to participate in the writing of the screenplay, but chose to take a backseat. Chevalier does not regret this decision. She is very pleased with the finished product and is especially impressed with Johannson’s performance.

“She has hardly any dialogue, but she just does it all with her face and it’s quite a remarkable performance.” She added, “I think the readers who liked the book aren’t going to be disappointed by the film.”

The film will be showing at the Cleveland Museum of Art the week of December fourth and is scheduled for general release in January.

Chevalier has recently begun research for her next novel, which will be about William Blake and the effect he had on other people.

“There’s a wonderful story about he and his wife that [they] would sit out in the backyard naked, pretending they were Adam and Eve, and making poetry for each other. I had a vision in my head and I thought, one day there’s a boy on one side of the fence, and there’s a girl on the other side of the fence, looking in on this, and they’re like eight or nine years old, and then they see each other. And I just thought that’s the first scene, now what’s next?

“ So I’m working on the where-do-I-go-from-here.”