Johanna Bordewijk-Roepman was a versatile composer, largely self-taught, who displayed enormous originality. Her music cannot be neatly categorised into any particular style or school. She wrote for piano, small ensembles, large orchestra, choirs and even carillon. During the Second World War she was a supporter of the artists’ resistance and courageously refused to register with the Kultuurkamer, imposed on Dutch intellectuals and artists by the German occupiers to register, regulate and/or restrict their activities. Those who signed up to participate had to sign a declaration of Aryan ethnicity; Jews were excluded. After the war, Bordewijk-Roepman and her husband, Ferdinand Bordewijk, were members of the Ereraden (Courts of Honour), established so that each profession could purge those colleagues who had collaborated with the Nazis.

Johanna Suzanna Hendrina Roepman was born in Rotterdam on 4 August 1892, the second of three daughters of the pharmacist Maarten Adrianus Roepman and his wife, Elisabeth Ringlever. She was raised in an affluent environment: the family business was the sole pharmacy in Rotterdam harbour, servicing the large merchant ships for all their pharmaceutical requirements, and business boomed. The family moved to The Hague when her father had to stop working, on medical grounds.

She had piano and singing lessons and sang in a children's choir until the age of sixteen but, in her own words, had hardly learned a thing. She was also interested in fine arts and eventually, after pleading with her parents for a long time, was allowed to attend art school, but because her art classes coincided with the publicly accessible dress rehearsals of the Residentie Orchestra, she opted instead for music. In her family's view, music was not considered to be an inappropriate profession for a girl, and so she studied English as an alternative, working as an English teacher until her marriage to the lawyer and writer Ferdinand Bordewijk. They met in October 1911, when he had just graduated with a law degree, and married in 1914; they had two children, Robert and Nina.

The couple shared a mutual interest in the arts, particularly literature and music. Ferdinand practised law from 1913, but he would also become one of the most important Dutch writers, publishing his first poems in 1916.