Jacob Jan Cremer

These short stories of Dutch provincial life are written in the dialect of the Betuwe, the large flat Gelderland island, formed by the Rhine, the name recalling the presumed earliest inhabitants, the Batavi.

[1] In his later novels Cremer abandoned both the language and the love-stories of the Betuwe, depicting the Dutch life of other centres in the national tongue.

The principal are: Anna Rooze (1867), Dokter Helmond en zijn Vrouw (1870), Hanna de Freule (1873), and Daniel Sils.

Cremer was less successful as a playwright, and his two comedies, Peasant and Nobleman and Emma Bertholt, did not enhance his fame; nor did a volume of poems, published in 1873.

An English-language novel by Albert Dresden Vandam, based on Anna Rooze, was published in London (1877, 3 volumes) under the title of An Everyday Heroine.