Elisabeth Eybers is regarded as the first of the great Afrikaans female poets. She was born in the Western Transvaal and lived in Johannesburg both while a student and during her marriage to the industrialist Albert Wessels (1908–1991). They divorced in 1961, when she moved to Amsterdam. Her initial writerly concerns were with traditional issues like pregnancy, the home and motherhood, but she evolved into a poet who confronted the vicissitudes of life with a strong, ironic voice. She published twenty-two volumes of poetry, all except the last of which are collected in Versamelde gedigte (Collected Poems) (2004), as well as a number of short stories, reviews and essays. She was also an acclaimed poet in the Netherlands.