The mundane facts of Schmidt’s life, a woman who is arguably the most popular writer that Holland has ever produced, is not cut from the same mold as the regular romantic stories of genius. She sounds like an ordinary person who had a great gift for the kind of literature she wrote. The flip side is that the average American listener might find the facts of her life a little too mundane to exist as a primer on who she actually is as a writer. Although three million copies of her work have sold in Holland, making her sales only second to the bible in that country, I imagine most here are probably not familiar with her and in the piece you don’t actually gain access to the worlds she created. It might have been helpful to have heard a little bit more of the work itself. It’s sort of like explaining fifty years from now to the Dutch who the woman who created Harry Potter was. It’s hard for us to understand her importance without more of a context and access to the work itself. The archival tape of her Dutch musical radio soap operas in the 50’s are really nice as is the brief readings and the use of music to evoke the age. This would be nice as a part of a series on writers from other countries.