Teaching Dutch Women Through Historical Fiction

Authors of great historical fiction must keep their readers enthralled, transport them to another place and time, develop complex individuals and issues, and consider age-old human dilemmas, while accurately revealing how very different people's ideas and experiences were in other times and places. Although each of the four works of historical fiction under review was a pleasure to read, the most successful in achieving these goals are the two focused on Dutch art: Dominic Smith's The Last Painting of Sara De Vos and Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring. These books illuminate women's roles in the production of Dutch painting as artists, as well as artists' assistants who gained access to a maledominated trade by living in artistic households.

Chevalier capitalizes on the celebrity of famous artists by allowing her readers to meditate on the life of well-loved Dutch master, Johannes Vermeer. However, this book does not mindlessly transfigure Vermeer into a hero. Its brilliance lies in its focus on the complex and fascinating protagonist Griet, a young girl hired to clean the artist's studio, her relationships with her family and a young suitor, her placement in the delicate and volatile hierarchy of her new household, and the nuanced depiction of Vermeer as talented, affectionate, and fair, yet also aloof, conflicted, and self-centered. By focusing on Griet, Chevalier is able to detail how important female family members and servants were in artistic production while also depicting what life was like for many ordinary Dutch people.

In a more original turn, Smith centers his thrilling story on two fictional female artists separated by three centuries: a seventeenth-century painter by the name of Sarah de Vos, and a twentieth-century art restorer and art historian named Ellie Shipley, in order to piece together what we know about Dutch women artists more generally. He builds a story around known biographical details and an excellent knowledge of seventeenth-century Dutch culture. Smith's work conjures the surviving sketches of leviathans by Petrus Bor and Hendrik Goltzius (and Simon Schama's discussion of them in his Embarrassment of Riches); paintings of sick children by such artists as Gabrielle Metsu; the winter paintings of Hendrick Averkamp; and the tulips of Rachel Ruysch, among many others. By foregrounding female artists, Smith allows his readers to imagine the practical obstacles frequently impeding women's artistic work, the fact that women's contributions to art were frequently not publicized, and the elation felt by those who have rediscovered seventeenth-century women's achievements.

Burton's The Miniaturist and McLeod's The Free Negress Elisabeth are also wonderful books that would certainly enliven classroom discussions of race, class, access to education, the legal consequences for deviancy, international trade, and the Dutch empire, but are less successful as works of historical fiction, albeit for very different reasons. McLeod's book depicts the extraordinary life of Elisabeth Samson, an eighteenth-century mulatto woman from Suriname. The author details a host of Samson's surprising experiences that have challenged historians' assumptions about what a black-skinned woman in a Dutch colony could accomplish during a period of slavery and racial subordination. McLeod argues that Samson was an astute business woman who owned many plantations and amassed her own wealth, and that she was remarkably successful in petitioning the Estates General to overturn decisions made by Dutch personnel in Suriname. Not only was she able to fight her way back to her home from exile in the Netherlands in 1739, but she was also permitted to marry a white man in 1767.

McLeod's painstakingly rich research is both...