Juliana de Lannoy

Juliana Cornelia de Lannoy, engraving by Ludwig Gottlieb Portman

Juliana Cornelia de Lannoy (born December 20, 1738 in Breda , † February 18, 1782 in Geertruidenberg ) was a Dutch poet.

life and work

Juliana de Lannoy was born in Breda in 1738 as the daughter of Maria Aletta Schull, who came from a wealthy family of city officials. Her father was the officer Carel Wybrandus de Lannoy, who continued a long family tradition with his career choice and served as a professional soldier in the army of the Republic of the United Netherlands (it was the time of the War of the Austrian Succession 1740-1748). After the first years of her life in Breda, the mother moved with Juliana and a younger brother to her family in Nijmegen in 1743, where the second brother was born.

Before she was twelve, Juliana's grandparents, her youngest brother and her mother died, so that she first lived in Zutphen with her father's family and, from 1952 , in Deventer with her father's second wife and her half-brother, who was born soon after . From 1958 the family lived in the garrison town of Geertruidenberg - where Juliana would stay for the rest of her life.

She enjoyed a comparatively broad education, is said to have read a lot early on, and learned to draw and paint. The principal of the Latin School in Breda, Adamus Christianus Schonck, taught her in language and poetry. She also dedicated her earliest well-known poem To Aristus from 1764 to him.

Juliana de Lannoy remained unmarried and "focused her energy, her zeal for work and her skills entirely on her literary ambitions." In her first published poem "Aan myn Geest" (Eng: To my mind) from 1766, she entered into a conversation between one of them lyrical “I” and a “spirit” for being able to lead a self-determined life as a woman - in her case, to compete with male writers as a poet and also to write the “great genres”, that is, tragedies and epics. Her tone is lively and ironic, and the poem and the three tragedies that followed were successful and critically acclaimed. Formally, she adhered strictly to the rules of French classicism; Compared to dramas by male poets, however, de Lannoy always placed a strong, positive heroine next to her main male characters, who gave the stories a decisive turn at important moments.

In addition to her dramatic pieces, de Lannoy wrote poems - religious poetry as well as mocking poems and some so-called "surprise sonnets " (French: sonnets du coude; Dutch verrassingssonnetten). In her poetry, too, she dealt with the relationship between the sexes and the conventional perception of women and men, but also dealt with political and social issues and wrote patriotic poetry. Of the four traditional sonnets, De onbestendigheid (dt. The instability) from 1779 is the most cited.

In 1772 she was the first woman to be accepted as an honorary member of the Hague poet society Kunstliefde spaaren geen vlyt . In the years that followed, she was awarded several silver and gold medals, including by the Leiden poet society Kunst wordt door arbeid kregen (German: art is obtained through work). Her collection of poems, Dichtkundige werken, which she published in 1780 after a serious illness and which she dedicated to Wilhelmine of Prussia , was enthusiastically received by critics - she was described as the " Sappho of our century and the honor of her family".

When Juliana de Lannoy died suddenly in February 1782, fifteen funerary poems and funeral songs were written in her memory on the occasion of her burial in the choir of the local Gertrudis Church.

Aftermath

Memorial column for Juliana Cornelia de Lannoy

The writer Willem Bilderdijk published de Lannoy's abandoned poems in 1783 after her half-brother destroyed all unfinished texts immediately after her death.

“In poems en de enkele van hair bewaard gebleven letter komt het beeld naar voren van een zelfbewuste vrouw the right voor hair mening uitkomt en soms wel èrg plagerig uit de hoek kan komen tegen bekenden en vastgeroeste tradities. Maar ook het beeld van een vrouw die nimmer de goede zeden nor de sociale omgangsvormen van hair milieu uit het oog read out. ”

“From poems and some of her traditional letters emerges the image of a self-confident woman who stands up for her opinion and is sometimes very upset about old and well-established traditions. But also the image of a woman who never loses sight of the good morals and social manners of her milieu. "

- WRD van Oostrum : Juliana Cornelia de Lannoy

Juliana de Lannoy is received up to the present day, included in anthologies and mentioned in almost every handbook on Dutch literary history. Their tragedies were still played well into the 19th century, but then went out of fashion (like most of that time). In 1985 the literary scholar Gerrit Jan van Bork (* 1935) wrote that her works had been forgotten because they did not stand out above the mediocrity of their time. In the context of more recent research that examines literary works in a contemporary context and also in the context of gender research , scholarly interest in her arose again. For example, Wilhelmina PD van Oostrum wrote in 2004 that de Lannoy was shown only a “repressive tolerance” and that her above-average performance, which outstripped her male colleagues, had been raised to the new norm and thus the “threshold to fame” for subsequent female authors was only higher again had been laid.

Publications (selection)

Title page of the Nagelaten Dichtwerke ( Post-Date Poems), 1783

tragedies

• Leo de Groote (Leo the Great), 1767
• Het beleg van Haarlem (The Siege of Haarlem) , 1770
• Cleopatra, koningin van Syriën (Cleopatra, Queen of Syria), 1776

Poems and poetry collections

• Aan mynen geest (To my spirit), 1766
• Het gastmaal (The Banquet), 1777
• Poetry works , 1780
• Nagelaten Dichtwerke , 1783

Web links

Commons : Juliana Cornelia de Lannoy  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i j k} Bea van Boxel: Lannoy, Juliana Cornelia de . In: Digitaal Vrouwenlexicon van Nederland . January 13, 2014 ( online via resources.huygens.knaw.nl ).
2. ↑ ^{a b c} G.W. Huygens: Lannoy, Juliana Cornelia de . In: GJ van Bork, PJ Verkruijsse (ed.): De Nederlandse en Vlaamse auteurs . 1985 ( dbnl.org ).
3. ↑ ^{a b c d} W.RD van Oostrum: Juliana Cornelia de Lannoy . In: J. van Oudheusden (ed.): Brabantse biografieën. Levensbeschrijvingen van bekende en onbekende Noordbrabanders . Deel 2. Amsterdam / Meppel 1994 ( brabantserfgoed.nl ).
4. ^ ^{A b c} Wilhelmina PD van Oostrum: 2.7 Slavery, women's rights and theological controversy . In: Horst Lademacher, Renate Loos, Simon Groenveld (eds.): Rejection - Duldung - Recognition. Tolerance in the Netherlands and Germany. A historical and current comparison (=  studies on the history and culture of Northwest Europe ). tape 9 . Waxmann Verlag, 2004, ISBN 978-3-8309-6161-1 , p. 358 f . ( limited preview in Google Book search).
5. ^ Juliana Cornelia de Lannoy: Aan mynen geest. In: dbnl.org. Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren (DBNL), 1766, accessed on February 29, 2020 (Dutch).