ABSTRACT
The poet Hélène Swarth was born in Amsterdam on 25 October 1859. She was the youngest of seven children. When she was six years old, the family moved to Brussels, where Hélène received private tuition. Four years later, however, her mother’s intense homesickness caused the family to move back to Amsterdam. Hélène experienced this return as an irreparable break with the happy days of childhood. From that moment the child was imbued with a sense of sadness from which she would never recover, even though only a year later her parents decided to return to Brussels once more. She was sent to a boarding school, where she was poorly educated, as was customary with girls. Nevertheless, she managed to master the French language fluently and even began to
write poetry in French. When she was nineteen, she had composed her first book of poems, Fleurs du rêve, which was published in Paris (1879). Two years after this publication she had a new book, Printanières, which another two years later was followed by Fleurs mortes.
