Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Reviews | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
Chevalier weaves history and fiction into a beautiful, timeless, and intriguing literary tapestry - an extraordinary story exquisitely told.
Bewitching art experts and enthusiasts alike for centuries, the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries hang today in the Cluny Museum in Paris.
In each, an elegant lady and a unicorn stand or sit on an island of grass surrounded by a rich background of animals and flowers. Little is known about them except that they were woven toward the end of the fifteenth century and bear the coat of arms of a wealthy family from Lyons.
Tracy Chevalier takes readers back to the tapestries' creation, giving life to the men who designed and made them, as well as the wives, daughters, and servants who exercised subtle (and not so subtle) influences over their men. Like the many different strands of wool and silk that were woven together into one cloth, the lives and fates of these people entwine in complex patterns, crisscrossing as they seek desires sensual and spiritual, temporal and eternal.
An extraordinary story exquisitely told, Tracy Chevalier's The Lady and the Unicorn weaves history and fiction into a beautiful, timeless, and intriguing literary tapestry that rivals in grace and grandeur the masterpiece that inspired it.
If you liked The Lady and the Unicorn, try these:
by Vanora Bennett
Published 2008
The year is 1527. The great portraitist Hans Holbein, who has fled the reformation in Europe, is making his first trip to England under commission to Sir Thomas More. In the course of six years, Holbein will become a close friend to the More family and paint two nearly identical family portraits. But closer examination of the paintings reveals that...
by Philippa Gregory
Published 2007
Gregory vividly brings Henry VIII's court, with its intense intrigues, politics, and passions, to life though the lives, and deaths, of his fourth, fifth and sixth wives.
The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it...
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!