She was left with only an apartment in Paris filled with a few items of furniture and about 200 then valueless works of her brother-in-law Vincent. Although advised to dispose of the pictures, she instead moved back to the Netherlands, opened a boarding house in Bussum, a village 25 km from Amsterdam, and began to re-establish her artistic contacts. She had not kept her diary during her marriage, but resumed it, intending that her son should read it someday. To earn extra income she translated short stories from French and English into Dutch. In 1905, to the evident disapproval of her family, she was one of the founding members of a women's socialist movement, but did not allow this to interfere with raising her son.