Louis Couperus - Biography

Biography

Louis Marie-Anne Couperus was born on 10 June 1863 in The Hague in the Netherlands. He was the eleventh and youngest child of John Ricus Couperus (1816–1902) and Catharina Geertruida Reynst (1829–1893). Four of his ten siblings had died before Louis was born. He was baptised on 19 July 1863 in the Église wallone in The Hague.

Couperus grew up in a wealthy patrician family. He was the great-grandson of Abraham Couperus, a Governor General of Dutch Malacca and many of his relatives were employed in the local government. The Dutch literary historian Rob Nieuwenhuys has observed that Couperus "must have known that his family was of mixed (Indo i.e Dutch-Javanese) descent".

Couperus spent part of his youth (1871–1877) in the Dutch East Indies, going to school in Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia).

After returning to The Hague in 1878, he published his first work of poetry. He was a journalist for Het Vaderland and De Haagse Post. Only after the publication of his first novel, Eline Vere, he became an established author, in 1888.

In 1891, Couperus married his niece Elisabeth Baud (1867–1960), who in 1893 translated Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray into Dutch. They had no children.

The famous author and his wife lived most of their married life in boarding houses and rented villas in France and Italy. Settling in Florence and Nice until 1910, they then began travelling more broadly throughout Italy. Their worldly goods and library were moved about in huge trunks and crates. When the First World War started they reluctantly moved back to The Hague. During all of his life, Couperus travelled around the world, such as to North Africa and Japan in the 1920s.

In 1921 they visited London, also on the request of the Dutch ambassador René de Marees van Swinderen. The visit was organised by Couperus' translator Alexander Teixeira de Mattos who was married to the widow of Willie Wilde, brother of Oscar.

A renowned wit, raconteur and commentator, Couperus continued to publish critically and commercially successful work until his death of sepsis in 1923. His most important works have been in print ever after. A Louis Couperus Society was first established in the 1930s, afterwards in 1993 (there are currently 600 members). In 1996 the Louis Couperus Museum was founded at the Javastraat, not far from where the author had lived.

After a collection of his works in twelve volumes had been published in 1952-1957 (reprinted in 1975), in 1987-1996, his complete works have been published in fifty volumes. A semi-annual publication, Arabesken, has been dedicated to his work since 1993, and among a host of publications about Couperus, the standard biography by Frédéric Bastet (1987) is most notable.