Griet

At the opening of the novel, Griet is a sixteen-year-old girl chopping vegetables in the kitchen for the family stew. This simple domestic act leads to a troublesome job working for the painter Vermeer, and eventually sitting as the model for his most famous painting, Girl with a Pearl Earring. Griet is a beautiful girl with wide-set eyes that are her most striking feature. She was raised with a very religious family and has thus become quite conservative in her teenage years. Griet can almost always be seen wearing a long white cap that covers her hair and eyes, so that no one can see her expression. Griet keeps her hair hidden because to her it symbolizes a wild side of her that she would like to keep contained. Griet spends her entire life trying to keep her hair, and therefore her sexuality, hidden from the men in...