In Tracy Chevalier’s breakaway novel “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” the blue and yellow head cloth that servant girl Griet insists on wearing when she poses for her master, Johannes Vermeer, becomes the unforgettable element of allure in her portrait.

Griet’s poignant gaze captivates the 17th-century Dutch painter and Chevalier’s readers alike. Yet before there was a Griet to challenge the muse’s expected passivity, there was a spirited Huguenot peasant called Isabelle.

“The Virgin Blue,” Chevalier’s under-recognized literary debut—published in Britain in 1997 but not released in this country until 2003—tells the dual narratives of 16th-century Isabelle Tournier and her modern-day descendant, Boston-bred Ella Turner, two women who are linked by a haunting family secret.

The novel’s quotation from Goethe’s “Theory of Colors” indicates the genesis of Chevalier’s characteristically cerebral style: “As yellow is always accompanied with light, so it may be said that blue still brings a principle of darkness with it.”

As Isabelle gazes upon her village church’s statue of the Virgin Mary in the novel’s opening scene, she exhibits her ability to perceive beauty in the everyday interplay of light and shadow: “Isabelle stared up at the Virgin, the blue behind the statue faded but with a power still to move her.”

Yet the year is 1572, and in a village in the mountainous Cévennes region of sourthern France now under the control of itinerant Calvinist preacher Monsieur Marcel, expressing sympathy for a symbol of Catholic veneration is not a prudent act. Because legend says that the Virgin was a redhead, Isabelle’s hair—a “halo of copper”—earns her the villager’s suspicion that she practices witchcraft.

In the modern-day narrative, Ella has followed her husband Rick to Toulouse, France where he has been relocated by his architectural firm.

Feeling neglected by Rick, Ella is troubled by a recurrent nightmare. “There’s a voice—no, two voices, one speaking in French, the other crying, really hysterical crying. All of this is in a fog, like the air is very heavy, like water. And there’s a thud at the end, like a door being shut. And most of all there’s the colour blue everywhere,” she describes.

As Ella details the genealogical research by which she hopes to uncover the hidden meaning of her dream, her narrative comes to mimetically parallel that of Isabelle.

When the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre instigates a wave of violent attacks on Huguenots throughout France, Isabelle flees to Switzerland with Etienne and her children, hoping to find there religious toleration. As Ella and Rick’s marriage crumbles, Ella’s hair takes on Isabelle’s copper cast, and it is to a distant cousin’s home in Switzerland that Ella herself flees.

Ella has learned from her research that the blue color in her dream is that of the precious lapis lazuli pigment used in Renaissance paintings to emphasize the Virgin’s miraculous agency. And as the color recurs throughout Chevalier’s novel, it becomes a motif for Isabella’s and Ella’s own searches for agency.

Blue is the color of the beautiful “Catholic cloth”—a “soft wool, dyed very deep”—for which Isabelle resists Huguenot mores in buying from a peddlar. Blue is also the color of the distant horizon of the Cévennes mountains that Isabelle has left behind.

For Ella, the color blue carries the grave portent incarnated in a Renaissance painting she stumbles upon: “Only the Virgin’s face, dead center in the painting, moved and changed, pain and a strange peace battling in her features as she gazed down at her dead son, framed by a colour that reflected her agony.”

For Isabelle, Switzerland will not be be the land of freedom for her children she has envisaged. Chevalier is not remiss in reminding us that young lives can end tragically. The novel suggests that every family has a skeleton in the closet. (Or in Isabelle’s 16th century equivalent, a skeleton under the foundations of the house).

Yet rather than ending on a sobering note of subjection to historical conditions, the epilogue closes the novel with a final incarnation of the color blue. Isabelle is at a crossroads, questioning whether to go forward, back, or remain where she is. A“blue light surrounds her, giving her solace for the briefest moment.” Blue ultimately represents the ability of Chevalier’s luminous prose to capture the beauty of the fleeting moments in her heroines’ lives.

The Virgin Blue
By Tracy Chevalier
Plume
Out Now