Novel
Eline Vere
Louis Couperus · 1888
Opening lines
Men verdrong zich in de, tot kleedkamer ingerichte, eetzaal.
People were crowding into the dining room, which had been turned into a dressing room.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Eline Vere, twenty-three and an orphan, lives in The Hague with her sister Betsy and her brother-in-law Henk van Raat, in a society of visits, dinners and evenings at the opera. Idle, she falls in love with a baritone, Fabrice, whom she admires only from afar, and believes that a fan received on St Nicholas's Day comes from him. It comes from Otto van Erlevoort, who courts her and asks her to marry him; she hesitates, then accepts. But her cousin Vincent, a penniless traveller who holds the will to be an illusion, unsettles her certainties, and Eline must decide whether she will keep her word.
Context
The novel was written in 1887 and 1888 in the family home on the Surinamestraat and first appeared as a serial in the daily Het Vaderland, from 17 June to 4 December 1888. P. N. van Kampen published it in March 1889 in three volumes. An English translation appeared as early as 1892, another in 2010. In 1918, the Verkade theatre in The Hague staged an adaptation by the author's wife. No complete French translation exists: only extracts have been translated, in 2023, in a literary translation workshop in Paris.
Who it is for
A long psychological novel of more than four hundred pages, in which everything plays out in visits, dinners and conversations; it can be read in Dutch or in English.
Prizes and reception
The novel that made its author known throughout the country, reissued without interruption ever since; twelfth in 2002 and thirteenth in 2022 in the canon surveys.