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       Antoinette Wind

antoinette wind

Pseudonym:
       A.H. Nijhoff

Antoinette Wind (1897–1971) was a Dutch author. Her friends knew her as Netty. During high school she dated a boy called Martinus Nijhoff (later the poet); he was a few years above her at the same school. In 1915 they married and Antoinette took her husbands name ‘Nijhoff’. In 1929 she met the artist Marlow Moss, who would become her lover (even while she was still married to Nijhoff). Several characters in her novels ‘Twee meisjes en ik’ [two girls and I] and ‘Venus in Ballingschap’ [Venus in exile] are based on Moss.
       In 1930 Nijhoff published two chapters of ‘Twee meisjes en ik’ in ‘De Gids’, using the pen name A.H. Nijhoff. It had been Martinus Nijhoff who came up with this name. ‘A.H.’ so it would remain a mystery whether the writer be a man or woman. Netty also chose a male narrator. In fact, her main characters were always male, and all seem to face similar dilemmas: whether to continue in their quiet life of marriage, home, career and children, or to escape in to the freedoms of the unknown. One represented the bourgeois hell, the other a paradise of fools.

See also Marlow Moss.

Source:
Pruis, M. (1994), ‘De lieflijke hel van het Hollandse binnenhuisje, leven en werk van A.H. Nijhoff’ (1994), VITA, Amsterdam


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