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These two women, who often published their novels and other works together, are generally considered to be the only women writers who were permitted entry to “official” Dutch literary historiography. Elisabeth Wolff-Bekker (1738-1804) and Agatha Deken (1741-1804) are said to have inaugurated the history of the Dutch novel publishing in 1782 their epistolary novel De historie van Sara Burgerhart.
Both ladies, living together after the death of husband Rev. Wolff, found themselves the center of an important network of friends – literary and other – with whom letters were exchanged. P.J. Buijnsters, who also wrote a common biography, published this correspondence in 1987. Much, of course, has been lost: Buijnsters suggests that the two women destroyed letters at different phases of their life (Buijnsters, 49). For that reason probably, the 253 letters do not really illustrate the supposed, and much discussed, preference for other women. They address or had been sent by 63 different correspondents. Two thirds of the correspondence consists of letters to or from someone for whom we dispose of no more than this only letter.
The presence of colleague-authors as correspondents is limited, male as well as female (50). In the whole of the correspondence seventeen women writers are discussed or mentioned (cf. the list – not yet fully complete), most of them compatriots – exceptions being for example Madame de Genlis and Madame d’Epinay whose works Elisabeth Wolff translated. To the former she even wrote a letter: it did not provoke any surviving answer, and possibly was never sent.
Bibliography:
- P.J. Buynsters (ed.), Briefwisseling van Betje Wolff en Aagje Deken. Utrecht, HES, 1987, 2 vols.
SvD, April 2007