27 september 2024

Launch correspondence Belle van Zuylen

On 27 September you are most welcome to attend the annual conference of the Eighteenth Century Working Group in Utrecht. During this congress, we will celebrate together with the working group that all 2,600 letters of Belle van Zuylen will be accessible online.

The congress will focus on the correspondence of Belle van Zuylen (1740-1805). During the congress, speakers from the Netherlands and abroad will discuss the different images of this writer in the Netherlands and in non-Dutch-speaking countries. The project leaders of the Huygens Institute hope that the online edition will contribute to a more internationally coherent image of this author.

All still-known letters written by Belle van Zuylen herself or addressed to her have been digitised over the past decade and are now available online thanks to volunteers of the Belle van Zuylen Society. There are now some 2,600 letters in total.

Almost all the letters were written in French. Translation into Dutch has begun. In the coming years, translations of more and more letters will become available. These have been made by volunteers from the French courses in Nijmegen and Translation Studies in Utrecht and from the Alliance Française.

Belle van Zuylen is one of the most international authors of the Dutch 18th century: she lived the second half of her life in Switzerland, as Madame de Charrière. However, she stayed in touch with her family and regularly worried about the political situation in Europe, and especially in the Netherlands. In her letters, we see that she continued to see the Netherlands as ‘mon pays’.