Aagje Deken

Dutch writer

• Born: December 10, 1741
• Birthplace: Amstelveen, the Netherlands
• Died: November 14, 1804
• Place of death: The Hague, the Netherlands

Deken, along with Betje Wolff, wrote the realistic epistolary novel De historie van Mejuffrouw Sara Burgerhart, often considered the first modern novel produced in the Netherlands. The work satirized Dutch society and delved into the inner workings of the middle class.

Early Life

Aagje Deken (AHG-yuh DAY-kihn), born to parents who died when Aagje was four years old, was cared for and educated by De Orange Appel, a pietistic orphanage in Amsterdam. Some sources suggest that she remained in the orphanage until 1767, when she would have been twenty-six years old.

Upon leaving the orphanage, Deken had little hope of being anything more than a domestic worker. She served several families in domestic capacities but yearned for a life of greater independence. While still working as a domestic, Deken became an entrepreneur, establishing a business marketing coffee and tea.

In 1769 she joined the Baptist Church and became active in Amsterdam’s Baptist community. Feeling isolated and alienated, Deken was searching for companionship. She had experienced some lesbian contact in the orphanage, and once she was out on her own she sought women for intimacy.

Deken never gave up her quest for companionship. Her early introspection led her to writing, mostly poetry, which led to self-understanding and realizing her place in society. She was not satisfied with her life, but the course it followed had been predestined by the premature deaths of her parents. She was alone in the world but was determined to take control of her own life.

The orphanage in which she was raised demanded from her obedience and acquiescence. As she embarked upon a more independent existence, her behavior was colored by tactics she developed to survive in the constricted institutional life of the orphanage.

Life’s Work

At age twenty-nine, Aagje Deken found compatible and rewarding work. In 1770 she was employed by the upper-middle-class Bosch family to nurse their sickly daughter, Maria. Deken established an immediate rapport with Maria, who was the same age as she. The two shared an enthusiasm for poetry, and both had dabbled in writing poems before they met. Deken spent two good years with the Bosch family, and she remained close to them even after Maria died in 1773.

Deken and Maria worked together on their poems for the two years preceding Maria’s death. Deken published their poetry in a book called Stichtelijke gedichten (1775; edifying poems), a volume of predominantly didactic verse. Meanwhile, Deken had read some of the radical writings of Betje Wolff, a highly controversial writer in her day.

Wolff came from a prosperous merchant family, whom she had disgraced by spending a single unchaperoned night with a naval ensign named Matthijs Gargon. This act brought upon her the scorn of her conservative community, Vlissingen, and of members of her family, who were strict Calvinists. In 1759, to distance herself from the disdain of her community and family, Betje married a widowed clergyman, Adrian Wolff, some thirty years her senior. This marriage, presumably a loveless union, lasted until Adrian’s death twenty-five years later. During the last fifteen years of that marriage, Betje Wolff published extensively and became a well-known writer. The early trials she endured would provide considerable material for her later collaborations with Deken.

Deken’s initial contact with Wolff was in 1776, the year before Wolff’s husband’s death. Deken was shocked by many of the radical ideas she found in Wolff’s writing. Having yet to escape the bonds of her pietistic upbringing in the orphanage, she wrote to Wolff, chiding her for her controversial views on education, religion, the status of women, and society in general. Much of Wolff’s most stinging satirical writing was aimed at established religion, to which Deken still adhered.

Rather then being offended by Deken’s criticism, Wolff detected in it an incisive intelligence and a clear understanding of her sometimes elusive satire. The two women corresponded regularly and met for the first time in October, 1776. Early in 1777, Wolff’s husband died. Wolff then invited Deken to live with her. The two lived together until their deaths (which were nine days apart) in 1804.

During their early relationship, Wolff, already an established author, and Deken, who had published but had not garnered the critical acclaim enjoyed by Wolff, continued to write independently. Soon, however, the two collaborated on novels based on their joint experiences: Deken’s in the orphanage and as a household servant and Wolff’s as a scorned and controversial woman. Their first collaborative effort was Brieven (1778; letters).

Another collaboration, De historie van Mejuffrouw Sara Burgerhart (1782; the history of Miss Sara Burgerhart), placed the two among the most significant writers in the Netherlands. The eighteenth century was a period in which most Dutch writing was stylized and mediocre, largely because of the complacency brought about by the commercial ascendancy of the Netherlands. De historie van Mejuffrouw Sara Burgerhart would see three editions by 1786. The novel was reportedly influenced by British author Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela (1740-1741), but it was clearly not derivative.

The Deken-Wolff collaboration would continue and result in three more epistolary novels, the most successful being De historie van den Heer Willem Leevend (1784-1785; the history of Mr. William Leevend), an eight-volume work that began well but became increasingly long-winded and philosophical as it progressed. Never again did the pair achieve the success they experienced with De historie van Mejuffrouw Sara Burgerhart.

A successful pastoral book grew out of their ten-year residence in France, to which they fled during the Prussian invasion of the Low Countries in 1788. They lived in Trévoux and recorded some of that experience in Wanderlingen door Bourgogne (1789; strolling through Burgundy).

Although Deken received an inheritance of thirteen thousand guilders in 1781, that money was gone by the time she and Wolff fled to France. They produced another multivolume epistolary novel, De historie van Mejuffrouw Cornelia Wildschut (1793-1796; the history of Miss Cornelia Wildschut) while in France, but tastes had changed. This novel failed to attract the large following of enthusiastic readers garnered by their first novel.

Financially strained, Deken and Wolff finally returned to the Netherlands in 1798, settling in The Hague until their final year. Barely surviving by doing translations, they were helped by the charity of various friends and admirers. Wolff died on November 5 and was followed in death nine days later by Deken. The two women were buried next to each other in Scheveningen, a Dutch seaside resort in The Hague along the North Sea.

Significance

Aagje Deken and Betje Wolff’s writing of the first modern novel in the Netherlands, De historie van Mejuffrouw Sara Burgerhart, assured their niche in Dutch literary history. Filled with keen insights into human behavior, the work nevertheless avoids being oversentimental. It is a realistic novel that draws heavily on Wolff’s experience as a satirist, producing the subtle and often humorous characterizations for which it gained quick acceptance by a reading public eager for a compelling tale.

Deken is recognized for her farsighted views on women’s rights and her honesty in dealing with her own sexuality. She was a woman of character who refused to live a life of deceit and apology. Her relationship with Wolff was the most important aspect of her existence, and she struggled to preserve it against daunting odds.

Bibliography

Kors, Alan Charles, ed. Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. 4 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. This four-volume encyclopedia includes an entry about Deken.

Meijer, Reinder P. Literature of the Low Countries: A Short History of Literature in the Netherlands and Belgium. The Hague, the Netherlands: Nijhoff, 1978. This is one of the few books in English on Dutch literary history. A useful presentation of Deken’s contributions to literature.

Nisbet, H. B., and Claude Rawson, eds. The Eighteenth Century. Vol. 4 in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Chapter 9, a survey of prose fiction in the Netherlands and Germany, includes discussion of Deken and Wolff.

Wilson, Katharina M., ed. An Encyclopedia of Continental Women Writers. New York: Garland, 1991. Wilson is to be commended for her comprehensive coverage of her topic. Her examination of Deken and Wolff is accurate, clear, and easily accessible.