Read De bruidstijd van Annie de Boogh in Dutchwith every sentence explained

De bruidstijd van Annie de Boogh by Herman Robbers was first published in 1901. In Passage you read the full text in the original Dutch, marked intermediate and filed under romance. It runs to about 76,200 words.

A wedding in Rotterdam. A brother coming home. A bride he has never met.

Paul Holman is a painter who has roamed Italy, Spain and England and now lives quietly in a Brabant village, happiest alone under wide skies. He returns to noisy, money-driven Rotterdam for one reason: his brother Louis, a dazzlingly successful young businessman, is about to marry Annie de Boogh, the daughter of a shipping agent.

Paul knows Annie only from a photograph — a serious face, thoughtful eyes. As the days before the wedding fill with receptions, family dinners and the roar of the Stock Exchange, the dreamy artist and his practical brother turn out to see life very differently, and Annie finds herself between two ways of living and loving.

Herman Robbers, one of the most popular Dutch realists of his day, paints turn-of-the-century Rotterdam and its merchant families with a sharp yet tender eye in this absorbing novel of love and choice.

Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in Dutch. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:

• a natural translation of that exact sentence,
• a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
• the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
• all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.

It's marked intermediate: comfortable once everyday Dutch feels familiar, with the harder sentences one tap away. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.