Ecstasy is the story of young widow roused out of the torpor of her solitude by a dalliance with a courtly womanizer. It is written in a dreamily impressionistic style whose primary concern is to capture its heroine's eternally shifting moods at...
Louis Couperus was catapulted to prominence in 1889 with Eline Vere, a psychological masterpiece inspired by Flaubert and Tolstoy. Eline Vere is a young heiress: dreamy, impulsive, and subject to bleak moods. Though beloved among her large...
"Cornelie De Retz Van Loo, a twenty-three-year-old divorcee from an upper-class Hague milieu, tries with mixed feelings to begin a new life in Italy in 1900. After some time in Rome, she discovers that Italy itself can never bring her the...
A mystical Javan prince and a promiscuous wife are twin challenges to Commissioner Van Oudijck's seemingly impregnable authority. As he struggles to maintain control of his district in the Dutch East Indies, as well as of his family, ancient...