Selected Writings

In 1928, the Amsterdam house of Em. Querido published a novel about a dancer who falls in love with a woman and calls it The Divine Sin. Its author, Edith Werkendam, was reviewed from The Hague to Medan, listed in the national press among the women writers who mattered, and is today almost entirely unread. This is the first appearance of her work in English.

At the centre of this volume is The Divine Sin itself, the story of Sylvie Herold, told from a provincial childhood to international fame and organised around five relationships: with a banker, a sculptor, a poet, a young woman, and a writer. It opens with a long passage from Plato on Eros as the guide who leads us up from sensuality toward perfect beauty - and its title is an argument with that passage. The phrase names the love between two women.

Around the novel are three shorter works. "What Could Not Be" and "Seven Days," both from her 1922 debut collection, show a writer already working in two registers: one spare and unconsoling, the other a sequence of prose movements in which voices speak from sunbeams and moods detach themselves from the self. "Hilversum at its (s)narrowest!!!" is Werkendam's own comic account, published in De Telegraaf in 1924, of the afternoon a constable arrested her for wearing trousers. And The Little Book of Flirting, issued in 1930 in fifteen hand-numbered copies, presents itself as a manual on flirtation and comes alive almost exclusively when its subject is a woman.

These are not books in which desire between women is coded or deferred to the final page. It is present, central, and sustained - and it is also never wholly possessed by anyone who feels it. Readers expecting requited love and a durable ending will not find either, and that is not a failure of nerve. Unattainability and renunciation run through the literature of women loving women in this period across several languages, and Werkendam gives them a particular and unusual shape.

The critical record, reconstructed here from the Dutch newspaper archives, does not tell the story one expects. Werkendam was not driven out of print by scandal. Several reviewers admired her; one called her work art; two of the three who disliked her went out of their way to deny their objection had anything to do with her subject. What she was accused of, in the same peculiar word over and over, was hollowness.

Translated from the Dutch, with an introduction and a critical afterword, by Laura de Jong.