Naturalism
Born in The Hague in 1863, Couperus grew up in a wealthy patrician family, spending part of his youth in the Dutch East Indies and going to school in Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia). Couperus was the great-grandson of Abraham Couperus, a Governor General of Dutch Malacca and many of his relatives were employed in the local government. The Dutch literary historian Rob Nieuwenhuys has observed that Couperus "must have known that his family was of mixed (Indo i.e Dutch-Javanese) descent".[1]