Augusta de Wit
Augusta de Wit (25 November 1864 – 9 February 1939) was a Dutch writer, born in the Dutch East Indies and best known for writing about Java.
Early life
[edit]Anna Augusta Henriette de Wit was born in Sibolga, Sumatra, the daughter of Jan Karel de Wit (1819-1884), a colonial official who served as Dutch Consul in Japan, and Anna Maria Johanna de la Couture (1837-1895). She had sisters Louise and Caroline, and brother Karel. She was educated in Utrecht and in England.
Career
[edit]Augusta de Wit began her career as a teacher at her alma mater, a girls' school in Utrecht. She returned to the East Indies in 1894, and taught at a girls' school in Batavia. For health reasons she left the classroom and became a writer, contributing to the Straits Times beginning in 1896.[1] She published a collection of her articles[2] as an illustrated book,[3] Facts and Fancies about Java (1898),[4][5] noting that "Hollanders do not understand the Javanese, nor do the Javanese understand the Hollanders, in any true sense of the word."[6]
Further books followed, including the novel Orpheus in de Dessa (1903),[7] Island-India (1923),[8] and De wijdere wereld (1930). She also wrote short stories, and corresponded with D. H. Lawrence about translating his works into Dutch.[9] As literary critic at the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, de Wit admired the work of Edith Wharton.[10]
Personal life
[edit]Augusta de Wit was ill for several years before she died in 1939, aged 74 years, in Baarn. "She ranked among such authors as De Meester , Coenen , and Robbers and was a writer of temperate realism with an Oriental touch," recalled the New York Times in a brief obituary note.[11] In recent years, her work is usually mentioned in the context of women writers and Dutch colonialism.[12][13][14]
References
[edit]- ^ Bel, Jacqueline; Vaessens, Thomas (2010). Schrijvende vrouwen: een kleine literatuurgeschiedenis van de Lage Landen, 1880-2010 (in Dutch). Amsterdam University Press. p. 35. ISBN 978-90-8964-216-5.
- ^ "Miss De Wit's Book". The Straits Times. 31 May 1898. Retrieved 2020-10-23 – via NewspapersSG.
- ^ Low, Eunice (2016-08-15). The George Hicks Collection at the National Library, Singapore: An Annotated Bibliography of Selected Works. BRILL. pp. 202–215. ISBN 978-90-04-32399-5.
- ^ de Wit, Augusta (1898). "Facts and fancies about Java". DBNL (in Dutch). Retrieved 2020-10-22.
- ^ Wit, Augusta de (1905). Java, Facts and Fancies. Chapman & Hall, Limited. ISBN 978-1-4655-8407-6.
- ^ Low, Eunice (2016-08-15). The George Hicks Collection at the National Library, Singapore: An Annotated Bibliography of Selected Works. BRILL. ISBN 978-90-04-32399-5.
- ^ Wit, Augusta de (1919). Orpheus in de dessa (in Dutch). Van Kampen.
- ^ Wit, Augusta de (1923). Island-India. Yale University Press.
- ^ Lawrence, D. H. (2002-11-28). The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Cambridge University Press. p. 21. ISBN 978-0-521-00700-9.
- ^ Werf, Els van der (2014). "Edith Wharton in Dutch Translation". Edith Wharton Review. 30 (2): 20. ISSN 2330-3964. JSTOR 10.5325/editwharrevi.30.2.0016.
- ^ "Augusta de Wit" New York Times (11 February 1939): 19. via ProQuest.
- ^ Beekman, E. M. (1982). "Dutch Colonial Literature: Romanticism in the Tropics". Indonesia. 34 (34): 17–39. doi:10.2307/3350946. hdl:1813/53750. ISSN 0019-7289. JSTOR 3350946.
- ^ Groot, Marjan (June 2015). "Inscribing women and gender into histories and reception of design, crafts, and decorative arts of small-scale non-European cultures". Journal of Art Historiography. 12: 1–32 – via ProQuest.
- ^ De Mul, Sarah (2011). Colonial Memory: Contemporary Women's Travel Writing in Britain and the Netherlands. Amsterdam University Press. p. 42. ISBN 978-90-8964-293-6. JSTOR j.ctt45kdr7.
External links
[edit]- Works by Augusta de Wit at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
- "Balinese Girl in Temple Costume" published by Augusta de Wit, in the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen, Amsterdam.