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Personally, I would use an underpainting which is more brownish than this, although black and white can work. (For skin-tones grey areas in the underpainting work very nice, so in that respect it's alright to me ).
There are a few distortions in the face when compared with the reference photo. You made her forehead too high and the form of the piece of clothing in her hair is different; now her head looks a bit strange on the painting. On the original photo, there is a beautiful curve in her profile there. You widened her face, her jawline has changed in form also, and her ear is a bit too much to the right. You captured the individual forms of the mouth and the nose and the eyes quite well.
One of the biggest problems is that you seem to be afraid of using shadows, The painting shows her more ethereal instead of a solid volume defined by dark and lights.
Personally I would have preferred to see the green of the original photograph instead of the 'Vermeer-blue' you used now. It would have made the painting more your own. Now it looks too much like an attempt to copy the Vermeer itself.
In the white piece of clothing I see the same fear of using shadows. I like the form of that white thing in the original photograph, now it is a bit like a undefined white form. Because of the lack of shadow in the face, its original effect gets lost. It would have caused nice reflections in the shadowed part of the face.
Her hair is much darker than as you painted it. If you wanted a solid tonal structure for the composition than you should have painted the face in a lower key than the piece of white clothing, same goes for the green piece of cloth in her hair and her hair itself. The tonal values seem to be very light or very dark, while the original photograph shows a more varied tonal structure. Much of these effects can be achieved by using an underpainting in which these tonal values are already indicated. Which then can be used as a guideline for painting the final layers of paint.
The way you make the background light up makes the image a little bit kitschy. I would have preferred to keep it quite dark there.
Although I guess that was not what you were aiming for, the ethereal character of the painting has its own appealing qualities.
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