The Virgin Blue

by Tracy Chevalier

First published 1997

Amazon

3.9(1,813)

American midwife Ella Turner moves with her husband to south-west France and finds herself isolated by village suspicion, marital distance and recurring dreams dominated by the colour blue. Hoping to create a connection with her new home, she investigates the French origins of the Turner family and follows the surname Tournier into the Cévennes and across the border into Switzerland.

Her research reveals Isabelle du Moulin, a sixteenth-century peasant associated with the Virgin Mary and condemned after her community adopts Protestantism. The St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre intensifies persecution of the Huguenot Tourniers and forces the family into exile, but violence and superstition follow them. As Ella reconstructs Isabelle’s life, the two narratives converge around inherited secrecy, religious intolerance and a crime concealed for four centuries.