Chevalier, Tracy

Ella Turner moves to France with her husband expecting a quiet life, begins researching her family's French ancestry, and discovers unsettling parallels between herself and a woman who lived four centuries earlier.

Nineteenth-century fossil hunter Mary Anning and spinster Elizabeth Philpot form a friendship based on their interest in science, and, when Mary's work is put into question by individuals who believe it goes against their religious beliefs and men in her field try to take credit for it, Elizabeth's loyalty to Mary becomes invaluable to her.

The changing social climate in England, spurred by the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, is reflected in the lives of Maude Coleman and Lavinia Waterhouse, two young girls of different classes who meet and become fast friends while their families are visiting adjoining funeral plots.

Imagines the young woman in Johannes Vermeer's mysterious painting "The Girl With a Pearl Earring" as a sixteen-year-old Dutch girl named Griet who sparks the interest of the artist when she becomes a maid in his turbulent household.