Nh. Dini

Abstract

Nh. Dini is generally regarded as the doyenne of women authors in Indonesia. The critic Budi Darma contends that she is the only female Indonesian writer to give voice to the "great spirit of feminism" in the second half of the twentieth century. Almost all of her novels have nonconformist women narrators who challenge conventional notions of female sexuality as passive and submissive. While, as the critic A. Teeuw points out, "she is not primarily interested in social or political conditions in the ordinary sense of the word," her protagonists are almost always victims of poverty, powerlessness, or treachery. She was a pioneering figure for the new generation of female writers who have made their mark on the Indonesian literary scene in the twenty-first century.