Writing the Living and the Dead. The Dutch Writer Hella S. Haasse as (Auto)Biographer

Abstract

This article is about Hella Haasse as a life writer. It considers her life writing in the context of her work as a whole before focusing on her experimentation with biographical and autobiographical writing as textual performances of selves. I argue that the relationship between the writer and her historical, biographical subject is affected by her attempts to grapple with her own life, past and present, in autobiographical texts. More specifically, I analyse Haasse’s literary experiment in terms of multiple, nomadic subjectivity with an emphasis on Haasse’s textual representation of processes of becoming.