| Augusta de Wit | |
| Other Names: | G. W. Sylvius |
| Birth Name: | Anna Augusta Henriette de Wit |
| Birth Date: | 1864 11, df=yes |
| Birth Place: | Sibolga, Sumatra, Dutch East Indies |
| Death Place: | Baarn, Netherlands |
| Occupation: | Writer, educator |
Augusta de Wit (25 November 1864 – 9 February 1939) was a Dutch writer, born in the Dutch East Indies and best known for writing about Java.
Anna Augusta Henriette de Wit was born in Sibolga, Sumatra, the daughter of Jan Karel de Wit (1819-1884), a colonial official who served as Dutch Consul in Japan, and Anna Maria Johanna de la Couture (1837-1895). She had sisters Louise and Caroline, and brother Karel. She was educated in Utrecht and in England.
Augusta de Wit began her career as a teacher at her alma mater, a girls' school in Utrecht. She returned to the East Indies in 1894, and taught at a girls' school in Batavia. For health reasons she left the classroom and became a writer, contributing to the Straits Times beginning in 1896.[1] She published a collection of her articles[2] as an illustrated book,[3] Facts and Fancies about Java (1898),[4] [5] noting that "Hollanders do not understand the Javanese, nor do the Javanese understand the Hollanders, in any true sense of the word."[6]
Further books followed, including the novel Orpheus in de Dessa (1903),[7] Island-India (1923),[8] and De wijdere wereld (1930). She also wrote short stories, and corresponded with D. H. Lawrence about translating his works into Dutch.[9] As literary critic at the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, de Wit admired the work of Edith Wharton.[10]
Augusta de Wit was ill for several years before she died in 1939, aged 74 years, in Baarn. "She ranked among such authors as,, and and was a writer of temperate realism with an Oriental touch," recalled the New York Times in a brief obituary note.[11] In recent years, her work is usually mentioned in the context of women writers and Dutch colonialism.[12] [13] [14]