Novel
Historie van mejuffrouw Sara Burgerhart
Not translated into English
Betje Wolff and Aagje Deken · 1782
Synopsis
Sara Burgerhart, nineteen, an orphan, lives reluctantly with her aunt Suzanna Hofland, a rigid devotee. Her other guardian, Abraham Blankaart, is staying abroad and advises her only by letter. Against the advice of her friend Anna Willis, Sara runs away and takes lodgings with the widow Spilgoed, where other young women live. Free for the first time, she goes out, lets herself be escorted by the frivolous Jacob Brunier, brother of one of the lodgers, and sets tongues wagging. Reliable men and others who are not come forward: she must learn to tell them apart.
Context
The novel appeared in 1782 in The Hague, in two volumes: one hundred and seventy-five letters from twenty-four correspondents whose names tell their character. The preface calls for a novel of the country, painted after the reader's own compatriots, and the title page bears “Niet vertaalt”, not translated, to set it apart from novels from abroad; the model of Richardson nonetheless remains visible. The heroine borrows from the youth of Betje Wolff a love affair that had compromised her. A second edition followed in 1783, a third in 1786, and the book passed into German and into French, at Lausanne in 1787.
Who it is for
An epistolary novel of about eight hundred pages, in eighteenth-century Dutch; Tonnus Oosterhoff produced a modernised version in 2021. Keeping a list of the correspondents helps in following it.
Prizes and reception
The first original epistolary novel in the language and one of the ‘windows’ of the Canon of the Netherlands, fourteenth in 2002 and seventeenth in 2022 in the canonical surveys.