Later Life

Constance Van der Welcke returns to The Hague after twenty years of exile in Rome, a social death sentence for her scandalous affair. The elegant doors of her former world remain firmly closed. She and her husband Henri now live in quiet estrangement from family and the aristocracy that once defined them. But exile has done its strange work. Through new friendships, Constance with the eccentric Max Brauws, Henri with her niece Marianne, each begins a tentative journey toward self-discovery in a world that has already condemned them. Couperus writes with devastating precision about the rituals and cruelties of Dutch high society, yet his true subject is what remains when pride, position, and pretense fall away. This is psychological fiction of the highest order: a quiet, luminous novel about the resilience of the human heart when everything external has been stripped away. It asks what we are, finally, when we are no longer what we appear to be.