In a Dark Wood Wandering

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This novel, written in Dutch, was first published in the Netherlands in 1949; it has never been out of print. Hella Haasse’s interest in the Middle Ages — and especially in the fifteenth century — had begun when she was a child in Batavia in the Dutch East Indies (now Jakarta, Indonesia). Her attention had been captured when, in 1924 at the age of six, she had seen a portrait of Queen Isabeau in her tall, veiled headdress. At once, she says, “I wanted to know all about that person.” This interest persisted: “While most boys and girls my age were collecting stamps or pictures of film stars, I collected books, articles and pictures about the Middle Ages.” In 1938 or ’39, while she was a student at the University of Amsterdam, she came by chance across an edition in the library of a collection of the poems of Charles d’Orléans, and everything she had read and thought about the fifteenth century crystallized around him.

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