Read Eline Vere in Dutchwith every sentence explained

Eline Vere by Louis Couperus was first published in 1889. In Passage you read the full text in the original Dutch, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 184,100 words.

Beautiful, rich and bored to tears. The Hague in the 1880s, and a young woman who cannot find her place.

Eline Vere has everything a young lady of The Hague could wish for: beauty, money and a lovely singing voice that charms every drawing room. Orphaned, she lives with her sister Betsy and Betsy's husband Henk in a house full of visitors, dinners and gossip. Yet behind the parties and tableaux vivants, Eline drifts — moody, dreamy, longing for a great love she knows only from novels and the opera.

Around her swirls a whole society: cousins and aunts, flirtations and engagements, sharp-tongued friends and patient admirers. When a dashing opera baritone sings his way into her daydreams, Eline's fragile balance begins to tilt.

Eline Vere (1889) was Louis Couperus' first novel, written when he was in his twenties, and it is still his most-read book: a richly observed portrait of a city and of a sensitive, restless heart, adapted for film and television.

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.