author
Agatha Deken
1741–1804
Known as Aagje Deken, she helped shape Dutch fiction in the late 18th century through lively, character-driven writing. Her best-known work was created with Betje Wolff, and their stories became classics of Dutch literature.
1 Audiobook
Historie van Mejuffrouw Sara Burgerhart
by Elizabeth Bekker Wolff, Agatha Deken
About the author
Agatha "Aagje" Deken was a Dutch writer born in 1741 near Amsterdam and remembered as one of the important voices in 18th-century Dutch literature. After losing both parents as a child, she grew up in an Amsterdam orphanage, an experience that shaped the moral and social concerns that later appeared in her writing.
She first published devotional poetry, but she became far better known after meeting the writer Betje Wolff in the 1770s. Together they wrote De historie van mejuffrouw Sara Burgerhart (1782), often described as the first Dutch novel, along with other popular works that mixed sharp observation, feeling, and humor.
Deken and Wolff lived through a politically unsettled period and spent time outside the Dutch Republic before returning home. Deken died in The Hague in 1804, only days before Wolff, and the two are still closely linked in literary history.