LIFE IN MINIATURE Jessie Burton's novel of the Dutch Golden Age, The House of Fortune
determined to seek out the elusive miniaturist. The Miniaturist experienced phenomenal success, especially for a debut novel. It was the star of the London Book Fair in 2013, provoking a bidding war which Picador eventually won; it was published by Ecco in the US. Upon its publication, it became an instant bestseller, and the BBC had a television adaptation out by 2017 which was viewed by millions. The House of Fortune is Burton’s sequel to The Miniaturist, picking up with Nella and her household eighteen years after the end of the first novel. When asked at what point she considered a sequel, Burton shares: “I tried writing some scenes as early as 2016, but I quickly realized I wasn’t ready. There were other things I wanted to write, and I needed to let the experience of The Miniaturist percolate in the background. It wasn’t until around summer 2017 that I realized I wasn’t finished with Nella and her family, or she wasn’t finished with me, and that at some point I would return to her. Around 2019 I did an event talking about The Miniaturist, and I realized how synthesized I was with the world in the book, and how much Nella means to me. That November I re-read The Miniaturist, the first time I had lifted the covers for six years, and then I started writing The House of Fortune.”
In 2014, Jessie Burton published The Miniaturist, a tale set in 1680s Netherlands. In the novel, Petronella Oortman, a naïve teenager from the country, is wed to Johannes Brandt, an older, wealthy Amsterdam merchant. Johannes ensconces Nella in his large, richly furnished home on the Herengracht, and his wedding gift to his new bride is a dollhouse – a beautifully-crafted cabinet which represents the house in miniature. The idea for the novel came to Burton upon first viewing the real, historical dollhouse in the Rijksmuseum, a detailed wonder of tortoiseshell, marble, rich fabrics, miniature Delft blue china commissioned directly from the Dutch East India Company. The tiny linens even bear Petronella’s embroidered initials at miniscule scale. The real Petronella Oortman furnished this beautiful cabinet at an astronomical cost, revelling in her conspicuous consumption. For Burton’s fictional Nella, adjustment to her new life is difficult. Johannes is kind but distant; his sister Marin, who runs the household, is a prickly enigma. Nella is less than thrilled with the gift of the cabinet, but bored and lonely, she writes to an artisan, making requests for items to start furnishing her dollhouse. The small packages begin arriving, and Nella immediately realizes there is something strange about the exquisite miniatures. When miniatures she has not commissioned, which seem to reflect not what is, but what will be, arrive, Nella experiences equal parts fear and fascination for this artisan, a woman who can see into Nella’s life, its secrets and its course, in ways that seem impossible. She becomes 8
FEATURES | Issue 101, August 2022
It would be understandable to have concerns for a sequel following on such a successful debut, but Burton says, “My concerns were not with replicating the ‘success’ of its predecessor, and more with writing truthfully, honouring what Nella gave me in the past, and bringing her into her future.” Burton accomplishes this by expanding the characterization in The House of Fortune. Without spoilers for the first novel, suffice it to say that The House of Fortune is not only Nella’s tale, but also that of her niece, Thea, and the two women’s relationship with each other as the family navigates an increasingly difficult financial and social situation. Nella’s experiences have changed her, in many ways jaded her, while Thea exhibits all the dangerous exuberance of teenaged inexperience. Though the challenges she faces will be different, in many ways, Thea’s naivete mirrors that of the younger Nella from the beginning of The Miniaturist. Burton explains: “I often have an older and a younger woman in dialogue with each other in my novels. I seem to like writing a lot of young women on the cusp of their adult life, and older women who understand the nuances of that life a bit better: the compromises, the acts of forgiveness, the complexity of love. A psychologist can make of that what she will! I don’t think it’s that uncommon to writing the experience of womanhood, seen from different angles. There is a lot of pain that can be caused when two people, who care for each other, feel mutually misunderstood. The House of Fortune seeks to take Thea and Nella through that journey to seeing the other more clearly.” While Nella and Thea’s relationship is central to the novel, there are other female characters who allow for exploration of the “experience of womanhood” in early 18th-century Holland. Nella is keenly aware of Amsterdam’s rich widows, pondering that they “had money of their own, and their dead husbands’ fortunes. As widows, they were no longer legal entities controlled by a husband.” Burton explains the relative freedom that Dutch women could experience in a time when female independence was far from the norm: “When a Dutch couple married, their personal wealth and possessions were itemised, and, if they divorced, a woman could
