Eline Vere is a passionate and rebellious young socialite, living in The Hague in the late 19th century. Driven by a highly active imagination, she attempts to escape the narrow confines of her bourgeois existence, and to force reality to live up to her dreams – but the world has other plans. In Eline Vere, with its fascinating heroine and supporting cast of her female friends and relatives, Couperus minutely and vividly evokes the characters, conventions, manners and hypocrisies of Dutch society in 1889 – and yet engages with topics that are generally debated to this day.