Letters Of A Javanese Princess
Through these letters, written between 1899 and 1904, the compassion, growth, humility, and pride of a young Indonesian woman, Raden Adjeng Kartini, reach out for the reader to embrace and hold dear. Raden Kartini wrote these letters between the ages of twenty and twenty-five, when she suddenly died after childbirth. Her formal education, rare for girls of her time, stopped at adolescence. At fifteen, she and her sisters were tutored in "feminine" handicrafts by a young Dutch woman, Mevrouw Ovink-Soer, an ardent feminist and socialist who articulated and nurtured the seeds of independence already planted in Kartini. Kartini's goal was education for Javanese girls, a radical thought at the time and at odds with her Moslem religion. But as envisioned by Kartini, education was the way to "set the rice upon the table for every Javanese." Indonesia, a Dutch colony for more than two hundred years, had a small but vocal Dutch group concerned with the treatment of the Indonesian people. Through her father's position in local government, Kartini met and corresponded with many Dutch people sympathetic to their plight. A childlike innocence permeates her letters, and while we read her changing thoughts about the Dutch and follow her growth as she comes to a more developed understanding of her culture and religion, we are pulled into her struggles for a greater good and filled with sorrow at her early death.-- For great reviews of books for girls, check outLet's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. --From500 Great Books by Women; review by Holly Smith