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Letters of a Javanese Princess

by Raden Adjeng Kartini · 1920

Memoir · Classics

Letters written between 1899 and 1904 by Raden Adjeng Kartini, the young daughter of a Javanese regent, about the lives of Javanese girls and women and her hopes for their education. This is a selection of her letters, translated from the Dutch edition collected by Dr. J. H. Abendanon.

Content note: Written around 1900 under Dutch colonial rule, these letters speak frankly about marriage, class and colonial society in the language of their time. The English text is a selection translated from Dutch, so it is shorter than the original collection.

75 chapters

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Japara, 25 May, 1899.[1]

I have longed to make the acquaintance of a "modern girl," that proud, independent girl who has all my sympathy! She who, happy and self-reliant, lightly and alertly steps on her way through life, full of enthusiasm and warm feeling; working not only for her own well-being and happiness, but for the greater good of humanity as a whole.

I glow with enthusiasm toward the new time which has come, and can truly say that in my thoughts and sympathies I do not belong to the Indian world, but to that of my pale sisters who are struggling forward in the distant West.

If the laws of my land permitted it, there is nothing that I had rather do than give myself wholly to the working and striving of the new woman in Europe; but age-long traditions that cannot be broken hold us fast cloistered in their unyielding arms. Some day those arms will loosen and let us go, but that time lies as yet far from us, infinitely far. It will come, that I know; it may be three, four generations after us.

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