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A RICH AND GRIPPING HISTORICAL ROMANCE
Germany, 1936. Nazism is taking hold. Janna, a young Dutch girl, has been sent to the embittered aristocrat Egon von Bötticher to train as a fencer. Bötticher is as eccentric as his training methods, yet the pupil soon finds herself falling for her master—a man tormented by a wartime past in which Janna’s father is implicated. Enthralled and disturbed by this dark world with its strange codes of honor and cruel rites of passage, Janna battles to understand her own desires and her part in the strange relationship between her father and the man who has become her obsession. A masterfully written story that sparkles and effervesces.
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Praise for The Dutch Maiden
‘De Moor’s nature metaphors are of an animalistic power, her reflections are as clever as they are distinctive, and how she evokes the sultry, stormy atmosphere on the eve of World War II testifies to her great storytelling ability’
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
‘With Marente de Moor, Dutch literature has won a very original writer, one with an apparently inexhaustible imagination, and who will, hopefully, write many more novels as exhilarating as this one’
Trouw
‘An ominous atmosphere, moral dilemmas, raging passions—all evoked by beautifully sculpted sentences’
NRC Handelsblad
‘A masterfully written story that sparkles and effervesces, demonstrating the richness of the language on every page’
Limburgs Dagblad
‘A fascinating read: a gothic romance transplanted to 1930s Germany. De Moor has lined up all the essential gothic elements—powerful currents of sexuality, a rambling old house, a possibly treacherous servant, a dark and brooding man whose true affinity is with the wildness of nature—and sent them on a collision course with concepts that come from somewhere else entirely’
The Herald Scotland
‘The Dutch Maiden has beautifully constructed chapters, which have been preserved in translation: an interesting, recommended read’
Dutch News
‘Mysteries, intrigues, old wounds, new wounds, tension, and sensation. The Dutch Maiden reads smoothly and swallows you up completely’
Pink Bullets
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MARENTE DE MOOR worked as a correspondent in Saint Petersburg for a number of years and wrote a book based on her experiences, Petersburgse Vertellingen (‘Petersburg Stories’), which was published in 1999. She made a successful debut as a novelist in 2007 with De Overtreder (‘The Transgressor’). For her second novel, The Dutch Maiden, she was awarded the prestigious AKO Literature Prize along with the European Union Prize for Literature. The novel has so far sold over 70,000 copies in the Netherlands and has been translated into ten languages.
DAVID DOHERTY studied English and literary linguistics in Glasgow before moving to Amsterdam, where he has been working as a translator since 1996. His translations include novels by critically acclaimed Dutch-language authors: The Dutch Maiden by Marente de Moor (longlisted for the Warwick Translation Prize 2017), Monte Carlo by Peter Terrin, and The Dyslexic Hearts Club by Hanneke Hendrix. He has also translated the work of leading Dutch sports writers Hugo Borst and Wilfried de Jong. David was recently commended by the jury of the Vondel Translation Prize for his translations of The Dutch Maiden and You Have Me to Love.
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AUTHOR
‘To write The Dutch Maiden I moved to a village bordering three countries; the detached nature of such no-man’s-lands has always appealed to me. Of course, this situation forced its way into the story, making it jump back and forward over the borders—between two countries, two World Wars, two old friends, between childhood and adulthood—like a fencer would over the center line of the strip.’
TRANSLATOR
‘As a translator you revisit a book again and again, refining your work in draft after draft. With The Dutch Maiden, more than any other novel I’ve translated, these return visits felt like diving into another world, thick with atmosphere, alive with sounds, smells, and arresting images and shot through with a chilling sense of foreboding.’
PUBLISHER
‘Marente de Moor is a highly original Dutch writer. Her language is exquisite and extremely well crafted, and her story sparkles with so much imaginative detail that it feels as if she is taking you along with her on a trip back in time, to a fascinating world full of raging passions, mystery, and moral dilemmas.’
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MARENTE DE MOOR
The Dutch Maiden
Translated from the Dutch
by David Doherty
WORLD EDITIONS
New York, London, Amsterdam
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Published in the USA in 2019 by World Editions LLC, New York
Published in the UK in 2016 by World Editions Ltd., London
World Editions
New York/London/Amsterdam
Copyright © Marente de Moor, 2010
English translation copyright © David Doherty, 2016
Cover image © Nini and Carry Hess / Ullstein Bild
Author’s portrait © Juergen Bauer
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data is available
ISBN Trade paperback 978-1-64286-018-4
ISBN E-book 978-1-64286-037-5
First published as De Nederlandse maagd in the Netherlands in 2010 by Querido, Amsterdam
This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained herein.
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Dutch Foundation for Literature.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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A braggart, a rogue, a villain, that fights by the book of arithmetic!
Why the devil came you between us? I was hurt under your arm.
Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act III Scene I
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Part One
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MAASTRICHT,