When his sugar factory went bankrupt in 1768 – Elisabeth was twelve – the family was forced to withdraw from the genteel society of the city and moved to Emminkhuizen (below Renswoude).

[3] Elisabeth was around eighteen when circumstances changed for the better: her father became a drost, schout, watergraaf, and tijnsmeester of the Heerlijkheid of Amerongen (1774), and the family moved into the distinguished Drostehuis residence there.

[3] After the death of father Post (1787), Elisabeth, her mother and her two sisters, Adriana Maria (1746–1831) and Didrika Johanna (1764–1841), moved to Arnhem, where Evert Johan had become a minister.

In reality, she became very productive in Arnhem, stimulated by her brother's literary circle of preachers, where Ahasuerus van den Berg, psalmist and author of edifying children's literature, set himself up as her mentor.

Precisely because of her lack of education, she was able to be original: Post was the first author in Dutch literature to describe nature not according to literary conventions, but as she herself perceived it.

[3] In addition to Het land, in brieven, Post published a collection of poems and prose fragments Voor eenzaamen (1789) during her Arnhem years, she wrote her second epistolary novel, Reinhart, of Natuur en godsdienst ("Pure-of-Heart: or Nature and Religion", three volumes, 1791–1792), and translated Friedrich von Schiller's Don Carlos (1789).

The exotic setting offered a strong opportunity for the exercise of literary sensibility and for moralising commentary on the eternal destiny of human beings and the certainty of the Christian afterlife.

Reinhart's accounts of the native Indians and the African slaves reflect the intellectual conflict between the Enlightenment noble savage motif and the realities of slavery.

[1] Post shows how a fundamental opponent of slavery can become tolerant of the practice for economic reasons, albeit as a good master who treats his slaves humanely.

[3] After the death of her mother in 1792, Elisabeth Post moved with her eldest sister Adriana Maria to Velp, between the floodplains and Veluwezoom.

Post became friends with the owner of Castle Biljoen and the Beekhuizen estate, Johan Frederik Willem, Baron van Spaen, and with his sister and daughters.

[3] In 1794, at the age of thirty-nine, Elisabeth Post met Justus Lodewijk Overdorp (1763–1844), a pastor in the seaside village of Noordwijk-Binnen, who was eight years her junior.

In her collection of essays, Het waare genot des levens, in brieven (1796), Post describes woman primarily as a wife, mother and educator.

In these years she also performed translation work again: Tafereelen uit het huiselijk leven (1803–1804) after G. W. Starke, the Werken (1804) by the Swiss S. Gessner, and Frederica Weisz en haare dochters (1806) after C. Garve.

In those months she wrote poems and songs almost as therapy, about her condition, most melancholy and religious in nature and fraught with feelings of guilt about her lack of faith in God.

She made friends with the patriotic former mayor of Elburg, the widower Jan Hendrik Rauwenhoff, and his daughter Anna Wilhelmina, who lived on the Tongeren estate.

A few days later, she was the first and only non-family member to be buried in the nature cemetery of the Rauwenhoffs, "in God's beautiful free creation", in accordance with her last wish.