'I have heard about you' discusses the international literary contacts between Dutch readers (male and female) and those women authors whose work crossed the border into the Netherlands. It focuses on women writers before 1900, from various European countries and North America. The articles in this collection give an impression of the importance of this foreign female presence in Dutch literature before the intensification of international contacts, in which the outbreak of the first feminist wave played a role: from Sappho, Georgette de Montenay and Mary Wollstonecraft to Harriet Beecher Stowe and Eugenie Marlitt. How were they read and evaluated by anonymous readers – male as well as female – and by well known individuals such as Anna Maria van Schurman, Conrad Busken or Margaretha Meyboom?

SUZAN VAN DIJK, Foreword: Foreign women's writing as read in the Netherlands. A task for historiographers   MARIANNE PEEREBOOM, Sappho: mother of all women poets   Part I - Creating the first networks: WYBREN SCHEEPSMA, Mystical networks in the Middle Ages? On the first women writers in Dutch and their literary contacts   JANET VAN DER MEULEN, 'Sche sente the copie to her doughter'. Countess Jeanne de Valois and literature at the court of Hainault-Holland   ANNE-MARIE DE GENDT, 'In future times more than during your lifetime'. The reception of Christine de Pizan in the Low Countries   JOHAN OOSTERMAN, Women's albums: mirrors of international lyrical poetry   RIET SCHENKEVELD-VAN DER DUSSEN, Georgette de Montenay and her Dutch admirer, Anna Roemers Visscher   MIRJAM DE BAAR, 'God has chosen you to be a crown of glory for all women!' The international network of learned women surrounding Anna Maria van Schurman   MIRJAM DE BAAR, Prophetess of God and prolific writer. Antoinette Bourigon and the reception of her writings   Part II - Finding international audiences: PIM VAN OOSTRUM, Dutch interest in 17th- and 18th-century French tragedies written by women   ALICIA C. MONTOYA, Republican overtones: Marie-Anne Barbier's tragedies translated, 1728-1774   ALICIA C. MONTOYA, French and English women writers in Dutch library (auction) catalogues, 1700-1800. Some methodological considerations and preliminary results   FINNY BOTTINGA, Eliza Haywood's Female Spectator and its Dutch translation De Engelsche Spectatrice   SUZAN VAN DIJK, A Dutch cultural magazine judging foreign women writers: the Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen 1761-1800   PETRA BROOMANS, Mary Wollstonecraft in Scandinavia; her letters in the Netherlands   ANNA HAUSDORF, The reception of 19th-century German women novelists and the influence on their Dutch counterparts   GABRIELLE MARTEL COTHEREAU-SUZAN VAN DIJK, George Sand and Dutch theatre censorship   IRENE VISSER, American women writers in the Dutch literary world 1824-1900   HENRIETTE RITTER, The critic Conrad Busken Huet on Madame de Staël's novels: Between antifeminism and androgyny   PETRA BROOMANS, 'The splendid literature of the North'. Women translators and intermediaries of Scandinavian women writers around 1900   LIZET DUYVENDAK-DIEDERIK GRIT, Magaretha Meyboom: not only a translator   About the authors   List of illustrations   Index