Edith Werkendam was born Judith Werkendam in Amsterdam in 1896. She published her first story in the literary journal De Gids in 1921 and, over the next nine years, five books with Em. Querido, including the novel The Divine Sin (1928). Her work was reviewed across the Dutch-language press and she was named in 1926 among the women writers represented at an exhibition of Dutch literature at the Stedelijk Museum. After 1930 she published nothing further under her own name. She lived her last two decades in Brussels with her second husband and her companion, a Polish woman known as Loulou, and died there in 1952. Her parish register records her occupation as femme de lettres.