Read Een liefde in Dutchwith every sentence explained

Een liefde by Lodewijk van Deyssel was first published in 1887. In Passage you read the full text in the original Dutch, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 116,300 words.

A dream of love. A real marriage. And the gap between the two.

Mathilde de Stuwen has been home from boarding school for four years, keeping house for her kindly old father in their house on the canal. After an evening of music with friends she cannot sleep: the elegant Jozef van Wilden, with his spotless cuffs and beautiful hands, has declared his love, and his letter lies against her heart. Alone at her window she counts the street lamps and the stars, and whispers that she has never been so happy.

But then Jozef stays away for days, and the dream must become an engagement, a wedding, a marriage. And Mathilde begins to discover that the man beside her and the love she imagined are not quite the same thing.

Lodewijk van Deyssel's A Love (1887), the boldest novel of the Dutch “Movement of the Eighties”, caused a scandal with its frankness about a young woman's desire — a sensual, intensely observed naturalist masterpiece.

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 advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate Dutch book and come back to it. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.