Book

Frederik van Eeden

The Deeps of Deliverance

The development of a sensitive soul

Although Frederik van Eeden wrote poetry, plays, scientific studies and essays on literature and painting, he is chiefly remembered as a novelist. Among his voluminous epic work it is specifically Van de koelen meren des doods (‘The Deeps of Deliverance’) on which his reputation rests. He himself considered it a synthesis of all his main themes, and stated that the work described: ‘the simple, classical movements of a woman’s life, tested to the utmost by melancholy, sin, sensuality, and yet with the triumph of death over death.’

The preface to this psychological novel opens: ‘Quite erroneously this work has been regarded as the psychological study of a more or less pathological case.’ With this, Frederik van Eeden wants to be perfectly clear: his novel is the product of an artist’s brain, not that of a scientist.

Van Eeden was a psychiatrist, man of letters, spiritualist, mystic, moralist and social reformer and in The Deeps of Deliverance, all these facets come into play. He describes the detailed history of a woman, while at the same time using the novel as a vehicle for his ideas about ethics and about the social conditions of his time.

The Deeps of Deliverance is still today an eminently readable thanks to the author’s empathy with his character, Hedwig Marga de Fontayne, a sensitive soul, who is disgusted by the banality of life and yearns for physical and spiritual contact; she finally finds salvation in death.

Although the novel had a mixed reception in the Netherlands when it was published, it went through several printings in England and Germany.

Translations

Frederik van Eeden

Frederik van Eeden (1860-1932) was one of the best-known psychiatrists in the Netherlands around the turn of the century. During his years of study in Amsterdam he developed an aversion to the one-sided emphasis on the natural sciences in his field and in 1885, the year that he took his finals in…

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Details

Van de koele meren des doods (1900). Fiction, 300 pages.
Copies sold: 320,000

19th edition 2004

Themes: classic

Publisher

Athenaeum-Polak & Van Gennep

Weteringschans 259
NL - 1017 XJ Amsterdam
Netherlands
Tel: +31 20 760 72 10

E-mail:
[email protected]
Website:
https://www.singeluitgeverije…

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