The Miniaturist

Plot

Petronella (Nella) Oortman, a poor 18-year-old girl from the Dutch countryside, arrives at the Golden Bend home in Amsterdam of the wealthy merchant Johannes Brandt, who married her a month earlier. She steps into a house of secrets held by Brandt's ascetic sister Marin, the servants Cornelia and Otto, and Brandt himself, who treats her more like a friend than a husband. Brandt gives her a wedding present of a dollhouse designed to look like their nine-storey home in miniature, and she engages the services of a local miniaturist to add realistic furnishings to it. The miniaturist, whom she never meets, begins sending her lifelike dolls and furnishings that are eerily accurate and even seem to predict the future. As webs of danger close in on the characters, Nella wonders if the miniaturist holds everyone’s fate in her hands.

History

Burton, who had studied English literature at the University of Oxford before embarking on an acting career, wrote the novel over a period of four years whilst supporting herself as an actress and PA in the City of London. She came up with the idea while on holiday in Amsterdam, where she viewed Petronella Oortman's doll house at the Rijksmuseum, and undertook extensive research on 17th-century Amsterdam, studying books, cookbooks, Dutch Golden Age paintings, maps, and wills. She trimmed the word count from 120,000 words to 80,000 words after participating in the first Curtis Brown creative writing course in 2011.

The novel was the focus of a publishers bidding war at the 2013 London Book Fair. Of the 11 publishers that vied for the book, Picador won the UK and British Commonwealth rights for a reported six-figure sum.

The UK cover design is a photograph of an actual miniature house commissioned by Picador, which reflects characters and elements in the novel.

Reception

As of 2016, the book has sold over 1 million copies in 37 countries.

While applauding the tone and setting of the novel, some reviews cited the shallowness of the characterizations. The Guardian and Chicago Tribune reviews observe that Nella is drawn more like a worldly, feminist 21st-century girl than a naïve 17th-century one. The Chicago Tribune adds: "[The main characters are] complex and complicated and suffer terrible tragedies, but Burton doesn't give us a deep enough look into their psyches. I'd read 100 additional pages just to get inside Johannes' head".

Awards and honours

In 2015 the novel also received a nomination for the Desmond Elliott Prize.

Adaptations

In August 2016 BBC One announced it had commissioned a three-part, 3-hour television adaptation of the novel. The adaptation will be written by John Brownlow and produced by The Forge. Location filming in Holland and the United Kingdom is scheduled for the winter and the series is expected to air in 2017.