The Virgin Blue
Tracy Chevalier, 1997
Penguin Group USA
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780452284449
Summary
The compelling story of two women, born four centuries apart, and the ancestral legacy that binds them. Ella Turner does her best to fit in to the small, close-knit community of Lisle-sur-Tarn. She even changes her name back to Tournier, and learns French. In vain. Isolated and lonely, she is drawn to investigate her Tournier ancestry, which leads to her encounter with the town's wolfish librarian.
Isabelle du Moulin, known as Le Rousse due to her fiery red hair, is tormented and shunned in the village—suspected of witchcraft and reviled for her association with the Virgin Mary. Falling pregnant, she is forced to marry into the ruling family: the Tourniers. Tormentor becomes husband, and a shocking fate awaits her.
Plagued by the color blue, Ella is haunted by parallels with the past, and by her recurring dream. Then one morning she wakes up to discover that her hair is turning inexplicably red...
Alternating between the stories of Ella and Isabelle, The Virgin Blue is a haunting tale of ancestral legacies set against a dazzlingly descriptive portrait of French provincial life today, as well as of the hardships—and harsh beauty—of life in the sixteenth century. (From the publisher.)