She may translate anything now she's m--- uh, not that she is
Yet another in the intermittent series of Stuff Women Could Do In the Past Contrary to The Usual Facile Preconceptions of A Woman's Place and Appropriate Conduct:
Unmarried Victorian lady translates novels that one assumes the average uvl was not even supposed to know the existence of, let alone, read, being as how they were not only in French (tut!) but were the works of Balzac (which along with Zola were almost certainly on the particularly Not Until She's Married And May Read Anything top shelf).
Okay, there is some evidence that although she did translate some of Honore's raunchier works, this had to be under a male pseudonym:
Anyway, Marriage [married name Garrett], Ellen (1865-1946), translator.
Went to Newnham! Did scholarly work on German folksong! Did dreary office work until a friend of the family suggested her to the publisher Dent as a possible translator for his edition of Balzac.
Marriage took far greater trouble over them than was then common with translations of French novels, not only searching for ‘the best words’ but visiting France to check local details and grappling manfully with Balzac's specialized vocabularies: ‘I have some heraldry that has fairly beaten me. There seems nothing left but the desperate step-a lunatic's step-of going to the College of Arms and trying what impudence will do’ (Ellen Marriage to Elizabeth Marriage, 3 Jan 1896, priv. coll.). The results were justifiably admired; her versions, particularly the descriptions and narration, often have the ‘colour and swing’ she admired in other writers and usually avoid the unnatural literalness that had characterized many earlier versions. Dent incorporated several of the novels into his Everyman's Library, begun in 1906, and many long remained in print.
Though, looking at the amount of work she did, and the pitiful remuneration (recalling Stella Browne's comment about translation being 'sweated labour'), it's perhaps not surprising that 'In 1901 she was admitted to Nayland Sanatorium in Suffolk, suffering from neurasthenia'. Though plz 2 give me leave to doubt that it was actually neurasthenia, as Nayland was a pioneering TB sanatorium run by a female doctor), so I suspect at least suspicion of consumption.
And she married into the Garrett family! (of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Millicent Fawcett, and Philippa Fawcett, among others, fame.)
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