I nominate
Eline Vere by
Louis Couperus
Free from Gutenberg.
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19563
Not free from Amazon.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_no...s=Eline%20Vere
Louis Couperus (1863-1923) is arguably the greatest Dutch novelist. He made his name at home and in the English speaking countries with psychological novels such as The books of the small souls, The hidden force and Old people and the things that pass.
(This novel is situated in The Hague. It was a great hit in these days. At the time of the installments in the daily newspaper, people asked each other: 'did you hear what happened to Eline Vere?)
The naturalistic novel, first published in a daily newspaper (1888-1889), instantly established Couperus as a household name in the Netherlands. It has been in print ever since. In Dutch, there have been about thirty editions until 2010, two adaptations for the theatre and one for film. Composer Alexander Voormolen dedicated his Nocturne for Eline (1957) to the protagonist of the novel. It has been translated into English (twice), into Norwegian and into Urdu.
After the publication of the translation by Ina Rilke, the book was reviewed in The Scotsman in 2010: "Couperus is a fine, driving storyteller even when he's off telling fairy stories in some symbolist landscape as in the rather mimsy Psyche. He wrote Eline Vere for serialisation, so it has the energy of the great Victorian novels without the melodrama, something astounding spread over 600 careful pages. ... Rediscovered novels usually make you realise why they were lost in the first place, but Eline Vere is an exception: a pleasure we've missed for far too long."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eline_Vere