Herman Johan Robbers
1868–1937
Biography
Herman Johan Robbers was a Dutch novelist, poet and magazine editor. He was born in Rotterdam in 1868 and died in Amsterdam in 1937. His father began as a book importer and later became a publisher, and Robbers worked in the book trade himself until 1905. His first collection of stories appeared in 1895, published by his father. After it came a series of novels in the realist and naturalist manner of the time, which described the milieu and society he knew well.
In 1905 he helped found the Vereeniging van Letterkundigen, the association of Dutch writers, and in the same year he took charge of Elsevier's Geïllustreerd Maandschrift, the monthly magazine, a post he held until his death. Through the magazine he encouraged many younger writers. His novel De bruidstijd van Annie de Boogh (1901) was a great success, and his main work, the two-part Roman van een gezin (1909 and 1910), follows the inner life of each member of a family against the social tensions of the early twentieth century. He was also a sharp critic of his contemporaries. His criticism of Louis Couperus drew an open letter from Couperus in 1919, complaining that it had hurt him.
De vreemde plant, the book on this site, is one of the early stories from his first years in print, which began in 1895. His reputation faded from the 1930s, but his main family novel was republished in 2016, more than a century after it first appeared. His fiction carries no explicit message, but it reflects the view that differences of education, income and standing matter less than what people share as human beings.
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Books
De vreemde plant
by Herman Johan Robbers
A motherless girl who has lived since childhood in a dream of a strange garden, where she is a tall white flower, grows into a fragile and over-refined young woman. When the plain, practical Wim asks her to marry him, she accepts, and Robbers follows what an ordinary household…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.