In 1686 18-year-old Nella Oortman, of good birth but straitened circumstances, is married to Johannes Brandt, a wealthy merchant twice her age, and dispatched to his luxurious house in Amsterdam.īurton's debut novel finds its inspiration in a 17th-century hobby for the rich: an ostentatious dollhouse owned by the wife of an Amsterdam merchant. However, by vesting Oortman with a modern point of view, she breaks the hermetic seal of her carefully imagined historical world, and threatens the integrity of the whole enterprise. She has described her award-winning debut novel as a "feminist golden-age fiction". Her Amsterdam is an overripe empire on the brink of rot, the excesses of its prosperity uneasily at odds with its Calvinist sensibilities. Nevertheless, she asks a miniaturist to create a few small items to furnish the house, and the objects she receives not only bear an uncanny resemblance to their real counterparts, they also suggest the miniaturist knows the secrets of its occupants. Lonely and unoccupied, she is at first angered by her husband's extravagant wedding gift, a perfect facsimile of her new home in miniature, which she regards as a cruel mockery of her powerlessness in the household. In 1686 18-year-old Nella Oortman, of good birth but straitened circumstances, is married to Johannes Brandt, a wealthy merchant twice her age, and dispatched to his luxurious house in Amsterdam.
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