{"id":115465,"date":"2017-09-01T08:29:46","date_gmt":"2017-09-01T12:29:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=115465"},"modified":"2017-09-01T08:31:03","modified_gmt":"2017-09-01T12:31:03","slug":"susan-vreeland-who-blended-fiction-visual-art-dies-at-71","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2017\/09\/01\/susan-vreeland-who-blended-fiction-visual-art-dies-at-71\/","title":{"rendered":"Susan Vreeland, who blended fiction, visual art, dies at 71"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"She<\/a>
She wrote about everyone from Pierre-Auguste Renoir to the Canadian painter Emily Carr and centred \u201cGirl in Hyacinth Blue\u201d on the journeys of an alleged Vermeer painting. (Photo<\/a>: Susan Vreeland\/Facebook<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

NEW YORK\u2014 Susan Vreeland, a popular and well-regarded novelist who blended her love for literature and visual art in \u201cGirl in Hyacinth Blue\u201d and other works of fiction, has died at age 71.<\/p>\n

Vreeland’s agent Barbara Braun said the author died Aug. 23 in San Diego after undergoing heart surgery.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe remained optimistic until the end, confident that she would survive and continue her active life with her devoted husband, Kip,\u201d Braun said.<\/p>\n

A native of Racine, Wisconsin, and a graduate from San Diego State University, Vreeland was in her mid-20s when a visit to Paris changed her life. She remembered being so dazzled by the Louvre Museum that she stood on Pont Neuf and vowed that the art of the Old World would be her \u201clife companion.\u201d<\/p>\n

She wrote about everyone from Pierre-Auguste Renoir to the Canadian painter Emily Carr and centred \u201cGirl in Hyacinth Blue\u201d on the journeys of an alleged Vermeer painting.<\/p>\n

\u201cGirl in Hyacinth Blue\u201d came out in 1999, a good year for art-themed novels, with other releases including Tracy Chevalier’s \u201cGirl With a Pearl Earring\u201d and Michael Frayn’s \u201cHeadlong.\u201d<\/p>\n

Braun recalled that Vreeland worked on \u201cGirl in Hyacinth Blue\u201d while being treated for lymphoma and that the novel was released by a small Colorado-based press after several New York publishers turned it down. The book became a word-of-mouth success, was translated into 26 languages and was adapted into a 2003 TV movie, \u201cBrush With Fate,\u201d starring Ellyn Burstyn and Glenn Close.<\/p>\n

In San Diego, Vreeland taught English in high school from 1969 to 2000. She wrote about art and travel for newspapers and magazines and published short fiction in Ploughshares, The Missouri Review and other publications. Her other novels, what she called the \u201cproducts\u201d of her pledge on Pont Neuf, included \u201cThe Passion of Artemisia\u201d and \u201cClara and Mr. Tiffany.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThanks to art, instead of seeing one world and time period, our
\nown, we see it multiplied and can peer into other times, other
\nworlds which offer windows to other lives,\u201d she wrote on her
\nwebsite, SVreeland.com .
\n\u201cEach time we enter imaginatively into the life of another, it’s a
\nsmall step upwards in the elevation of the human race.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NEW YORK\u2014 Susan Vreeland, a popular and well-regarded novelist who blended her love for literature and visual art in \u201cGirl …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":115468,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[22580,12861,22579],"class_list":["post-115465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-art-and-culture","tag-girl-in-hyacinth-blue","tag-novelist","tag-susan-vreeland-dies-at-71","mauthors-hillel-italie","mauthors-the-associated-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115465\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/115468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}