This collection of letters was written by Raden Adjeng Kartini, the daughter of a Javanese civil servant in the Dutch colonial government. After being granted the rare opportunity to attend a Dutch elementary school, at the age of twelve she went into seclusion in accordance with Indonesian customs for women of nobility prior to marriage. Her letters to Dutch correspondents offer a captivating glimpse into the life and spirit of a woman who challenged the customs of her time and forcefully promoted the rights of women to obtain an education. This edition faithfully reproduces the first English translation, which was published in 1920, and includes a contemporary biographical essay by Guggenheim award-winning scholar E. M. Beekman, as well as a detailed chronology of Kartini’s life.
İçerik tablosu
Contents
Foreword
Introduction
Letters of a Javanese Princess
Biographical Note
Biographical Timeline
Yazar hakkında
Eric M. Beekman was born in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in 1939 and emigrated to the United States in 1957. He earned his B.A. in English and Comparative literature from the University of California at Berkeley in 1963 and his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University in 1968. He taught for more than three decades in the Department of Germanic Languages at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and is the author of more than two dozen books.