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Maarten Maartens (1858-1915) is the penname of Joost Maria Willem van der Poorten Schwartz, a Dutchman who wrote poetic plays, novels and short stories in English between 1890 and 1914. But "Maarten Maartens" is more than just a pseudonym chosen because it sounded Dutch while it could still easily be pronounced by his English readers. Under his own name, Schwartz lived retired in the country in the Netherlands while, under his heteronym Maarten Maartens, he led a life as a writer and a man of the world. His works were published in Britain, in the United States and in Germany. Due to the variety of settings in different countries as well as well as due to the interest he took in all layers of society, Maartens can be considered a European rather than a Dutch or British writer; he is perhaps the first author worthy of such name. However, the fact that his themes were not limited to a particular social and cultural setting has never been fully acknowledged, because reviewers and critics continued to focus their interest mainly on the Dutch element in his works, i.e., the representation of Dutch life and morals. As Maartens phrased it in the preface to his fifth novel The Greater Glory (1894): "The morals I seek to describe are those of the entire human race. It is only by the merest accident that my scene is laid in Holland, a country whose inhabitants, I suppose, are no better, nor worse, than my neighbours." In this dissertation, Maartens is placed for the first time within the literary-historical context of the late nineteenth century and the question is explored whether Maartens is merely to be considered a minor author favouring the realistic mode of writing, who still gives us captivating glimpses into a social microcosm long gone by, or whether, and to which extent, he achieved his aim to surpass this aspect. For the general assessment, apart from the published works, a number of unpublished manuscripts are included, amongst which there are a play, several complete and fragmentary novels as well as short ...
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