Ecstasy is the story of young widow roused out of the torpor of her solitude by a dalliance with a courtly womanizer. It is written in a dreamily impressionistic style whose primary concern is to capture its heroine's eternally shifting moods at their most ineffable and ephemeral. This title is not just glibly rhetorical. The heroine and her suitor never consummate their passion never even exchange so much as a kiss; ecstasy is all. Louis Couperus was a prolific and cosmopolitan writer whose work has been compared to that of Thomas Hardy

Louis Couperus was catapulted to prominence in 1889 with Eline Vere, a psychological masterpiece inspired by Flaubert and Tolstoy. Eline Vere is a young heiress: dreamy, impulsive, and subject to bleak moods. Though beloved among her large coterie of friends and relations, there are whispers that she is an eccentric: she has been known to wander alone in the park as well indulge in long, lazy philosophical conversations with her vagabond cousin. When she accepts the marriage proposal of a family friend, she is thrust into a life that looks beyond the confines of The Hague, and her overpowering, ever-fluctuating desires grow increasingly blurred and desperate. Only Couperus — as much a member of the elite socialite circle of fin-de-siècle The Hague as he was a virulent critic of its oppressive confines — could have filled this "Novel of The Hague" with so many superbly rendered and vividly imagined characters from a milieu now long forgotten. Award-winning translator Ina Rilke’s new translation of this Madame Bovary of The Netherlands will reintroduce to the English-speaking world the greatest Dutch novelist of his generation

"Cornelie De Retz Van Loo, a twenty-three-year-old divorcee from an upper-class Hague milieu, tries with mixed feelings to begin a new life in Italy in 1900. After some time in Rome, she discovers that Italy itself can never bring her the consolation she seeks. She meets the Dutch painter Duco van der Staal, and they move in together, flouting convention. Almost their only acquaintances are an amorous Italian prince and the American heiress he wants to marry for her money. Duco and Cornelie are happy but poor, and as their finances go from bad to worse, Cornelie, in desperation, takes a position as a companion to an elderly American lady in Nice. There she encounters her ex-husband." Considered one of Louis Couperus' most compelling achievements in fiction, Inevitable immerses us in turn-of-the-century Rome and examines a life in which Art is an exalted form of love. The social issues Couperus addresses in Inevitable provoked waves of criticism upon its publication in spite of the author's tremendous popularity

A mystical Javan prince and a promiscuous wife are twin challenges to Commissioner Van Oudijck's seemingly impregnable authority. As he struggles to maintain control of his district in the Dutch East Indies, as well as of his family, ancient local traditions reassert their influence and colonial power begins to disintegrate