The Lady and the Unicorn

By Tracy Chevalier
Read: October 2008
Rating: Mwah!

I really like Tracy Chevalier. Like so many people, I began with Girl With a Pearl Earring, and loved it. I think I love this even more, though.

Based off the tapestries by the same name, the book follows the people engaged in its making in the 14/1500s. We begin with the artist, a rather unlikable man who has the hots for his patron’s young (14) daughter. He becomes the complication to the girl’s marriagability, and strikes an odd understanding with her mother. He paints both of them into his tapestry. To get him out of the way, he is sent to Brussels to oversee the transfer of his painting to a ‘cartoon’ that the weavers can follow.

That’s where the heart of the story is for me. I love the Brussels crew. I love learning how they weave, their business… Their interpersonal relations.

And it’s there that our selfish painted begins to sympathize with others, and feels the need to do the ladies there some justice for all they have put up with.

A lovely book. Perhaps not as satisfying an ending as I would have liked, but ‘satisfying endings’ were hard to find in those times and circumstances.

Read, and find some pictures of this exquisite tapestry.