When she accepts the marriage proposal of a family friend, she is thrust into a life that looks beyond the confines of The Hague, and her overpowering, ever-fluctuating desires grow increasingly blurred and desperate. Though beloved among her large coterie of friends and relations, there are whispers that she is an eccentric: she has been known to wander alone in the park as well indulge in long, lazy philosophical conversations with her vagabond cousin. Eline Vere is a young heiress: dreamy, impulsive, and subject to bleak moods.
Rediscovered novels usually make you realise why they were lost in the first place, but Eline Vere is an exception: a pleasure we've missed for far too long.Louis Couperus was catapulted to prominence in 1889 with Eline Vere, a psychological masterpiece inspired by Flaubert and Tolstoy. He wrote Eline Vere for serialisation, so it has the energy of the great Victorian novels without the melodrama, something astounding spread over 600 careful pages. Īfter the publication of the translation by Ina Rilke, the book was reviewed in The Scotsman in 2010: "Couperus is a fine, driving storyteller even when he's off telling fairy stories in some symbolist landscape as in the rather mimsy Psyche. It has been translated into English (twice), into Norwegian and into Urdu. Composer Alexander Voormolen dedicated his Nocturne for Eline (1957) to the protagonist of the novel. In Dutch, there have been about thirty editions until 2010, two adaptations for the theatre and one for film.
The naturalistic novel, first published in a daily newspaper (1888–1889), instantly established Couperus as a household name in the Netherlands. Couperus wrote Eline Vere in the house at Surinamestraat 20, The Hague. It was adapted into the 1991 film Eline Vere, directed by Harry Kümel. Eline Vere is an 1889 novel by the Dutch writer Louis Couperus.
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