Henriëtte L. T. de Beaufort (1890–1982)

Henriëtte de Beaufort was born in Baarn, The Netherlands, one of three children of Binnert Philip de Beaufort, mayor of the town, and his wife Alida Henriette Cornelia van Eck. She was educated at home before the death of her mother in 1907, then attended a girls' boarding school in Geneva, Switzerland. On her return, she audited courses in literature and history at the University of Utrecht. In 1914, she married Herman Laman Trip, a lawyer 10 years her senior; subsequently she published her writing under the name Henriëtte L.T. de Beaufort. Her account of their Irish honeymoon was published in the periodical Onze Eeuw in 1915. Her first book, Willem van Oranje, was published in 1916. Her husband became the private secretary to a diplomat and was posted to Washington, DC in 1918, where the couple stayed for several years. In 1924 with an inheritance from her maternal aunt, she and her husband set up a children's sanatorium called Hohes Licht in Oberstdorf in the Bavarian Alps of Germany, near the Swiss border. After her husband died suddenly in 1928, she spent more and more time at Hohes Licht. From 1933 to 1945, Hohes Licht was an important link in a smuggling route along which Jewish children traveled to safety in Switzerland. In 1948, Henriëtte published the book that made her famous, a biography of Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp. More biographies followed, such as Willem de Zwijger (1950), Cornelis van Vollenhoven (1954), Rembrandt (1956), and Queen Wilhelmina 1888-1962 (1965). She also wrote a travelogue, Space and Sunlight: Safari in Africa (1968). In 1956, she sold Hohes Licht and moved to Bennekom. She was the namesake and donor of the triennial Henriëtte de Beaufort Prize, given for biography or autobiography.