Born into an intellectual family who descended from slaves, Vlier was educated in the Netherlands and returned to Suriname to teach.
The book won a silver medal at the International Colonial and Export Exhibition of 1883 and was one of the three most-used textbooks in the Surinamese education system until 1945.
[1] Between 1832 and 1848, Vlier's father became a secretary of the Particuliere West-Indische Bank and overseer of six coffee, one cotton, and six sugar plantations.
[1][8] She called the trade in Africans "illegal",[9] but was aware of the negative impact on the career of Johannes Christiaan Palthe Wesenhagen, another free black who had written about slavery in 1849.
Two years later, when the International Colonial and Export Exhibition was held at the site of the Museumplein in Amsterdam, Vlier sent a copy of her second edition textbook to be judged for the prizes in the historical documents competition.
Vlier was not in the Netherlands to personally receive her award, but she traveled to Amsterdam in 1892, where she remained for two years before returning to Suriname.
At the centennial of her birth in 1928, she was honored for her contributions to the historiography of Suriname, but her history of being part of the black community had been erased.