[7] Hélène Serafia Haasse was born on 2 February 1918 in Batavia (now Jakarta), the capital of the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia).

She was the daughter of civil servant and author Willem Hendrik Haasse (1889–1955) and concert pianist Katharina Diehm Winzenhöhler (1893–1983).

[10] Before Haasse's first birthday, the family moved from Batavia to Buitenzorg (Bogor), because her mother's health would benefit from the milder climate.

[18] In Amsterdam, she joined a student theater group and met her future husband Jan van Lelyveld, who invited her to become an editor for the satirical magazine Propria Cures in 1940.

Her debut Oeroeg (1948), is set in the Dutch East Indies, where Haasse was born and lived for most of the first 20 years of her life.

Even more autobiographical texts and books about her life in the East Indies, includes books such as The East Indies continued to play an important part in her work: Krassen op een rots (1970) and her last novel Sleuteloog (2002), which has the same theme as Oeroeg: is a friendship between a Dutch colonial and an Indonesian child possible and can they really understand each other?

This Oeroeg was well received and often reprinted, but did experience some controversy due to the critical reception by the older author Tjalie Robinson.

It is a colonial historical novel set in the Dutch East Indies of the 19th and 20th century, based on family archives of the heirs and relations of the tea plantation owners featuring in the book.

It was the last time she would visit her birthplace, Java, and the year her Dutch Indies literature masterpiece Heren van de Thee was published.