Clare Lennart

Life & Legacy

Clara Helena Klaver (1899–1972), known by her pseudonym Clare Lennart, was a Dutch writer of fiction and children's literature. A prolific and popular author, she was mostly unknown to the Dutch literary world for much of her writing career from the 1930s to the 1960s. She worked as a school teacher and then made her living taking in lodgers, which also necessitated her using a pseudonym. A turning point in her career came in 1949, when her novella Twee negerpopjes ('Two Black Dolls') was the free gift for the book buying public during the Dutch Boekenweek of 1949. She could not dedicate herself full-time to writing until the early 1950s, when she stopped renting out rooms and her husband retired and could take over domestic duties. Afterwards, she published another half a dozen novels and a greater number of children's books, as well as a memoir.
Though she was a popular author with a personal writing style whose books sold relatively well, she did not make it into the canon of Dutch literature and is mostly forgotten.