Career
He lived in the Dutch East Indies in his youth and spent a great deal of his life outside his native Holland. He was certainly the most cosmopolitan of all modern Dutch writers. In easy circumstances, Couperus was a connoisseur of gracious living, introducing to Dutch letters a versatility, a charm and attitude of graceful detachment which at the outstart puzzled and shocked the public. He posed as a dandy, an idler, one indifferent to ideas, and many of the Dutch critics fell in the trap he thus set for them, but in England and Germany he was recognized as a writer of international significance. He was considered lazy, but he wrote about 70 books. He was treated as superficial, but none of his contemporaries analyzed with such loving care the lives of the people of Holland. He possessed great psychological insight and a style of marvelous suppleness and fluency.
In 1889 Couperus published his first work, a naturalistic novel, Eline Vere, which stood out in the literary production of his time. This work was made up of a number of novels dedicated to the highly refined society of the Hague, of many novels of pure fantasy, of historical reconstructions of deep psychological perception, and a tremendous number of short stories, sketches, and travel impressions. Among his translated works are De stille Kracht (1900) (The Hidden Force, 1921), Die Kleine Zielen (1901) (The Small Souls, 1932), De Komedianten (1917) (The Comedian, 1926), and Oostwaarts (1923) (Eastward, 1924).
Couperus was an urbane writer, an able craftsman of the novel. He liked to place his characters in those periods of history in which civilization had matured and was on the verge of decadence. Although primarily an aesthete, a moderate sensualist, he did not lack profundity, and his work, which has been criticized for being effete and modish, has stood the test of time well. His cosmopolitan experience, his catholic taste, helped to form his valuable contribution to Dutch letters.