Tracy Chevalier is a very good author with some brilliant books such as Girl with a Pearl Earring and Remarkable Creatures behind her, and I am wondering if this one sold so many copies because people were expecting more of the same. I suspect I am bang smack in the centre of the target audience for this one. Lady of a certain age who is not adverse to a bit of nostalgia, does a little tapestry and has a great fondness for Winchester Cathedral, but no, I wasn't struck by it at all. If I had misplaced it half way through I don't think I would have spent too much time searching for it. The lead characters just don't seem as convincing as the people in her other novels, and I felt as though Tracy Chevalier put too much emphasis on including facts from her research books, to the point that even the first page feels as though some of the text was cut from the cathedral guide book. We follow the (mostly) uneventful life of Violet Speedwell who, like so many other women in t...