| Sarah Austin | |
|---|---|
| Born | Sarah Taylor 1793 |
| Died | August 8, 1867 Weybridge, Surrey |
| Nationality | English |
| Occupation | Translator |
Sarah Austin (1793–1867) was an English editor and translator from German.
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Born Sarah Taylor in Norwich, England in 1793, she was the youngest child of John Taylor, a yarn maker and hymn writer from a locally well-known Unitarian family.[1] Her education was overseen by her mother, Susanna Taylor, née Cook (1755–1823). She became conversant in Latin, French, German and Italian. Her six brothers and sisters included Edward Taylor (1784–1863), a singer and music professor, John Taylor (1779–1863), a mining engineer, Richard Taylor (1781–1858), a printer and editor and publisher of scientific works. Family friends included Dr James Alderson and his daughter Amelia Opie, Henry Crabb Robinson, the banking Gurneys and Sir James Mackintosh.
Sarah grew up to be a remarkably handsome and attractive woman, and caused some surprise by marrying John Austin (1790–1859) on 24 August 1819. During the first years of their married life they lived a wide social life in Queen's Square, Westminster. John Stuart Mill testified the esteem which he felt for her by the title of Mutter, by which he always addressed her.[2] Jeremy Bentham was also in their circle. She travelled widely, for instance to Dresden and Weimar.[3] According to a modern scholar, Austin "tended to be austere, reclusive, and insecure, while she was very determined, ambitious, energetic, gregarious, and warm. Indeed her affections were so starved that in the early 1830s she had a most unusual 'affair' with Hermann Pückler-Muskau, a German prince whose work she translated.[4] It was conducted solely by an exchange of letters and she did not meet her correspondent until their passions had cooled."[5]
The only child of the marriage, Lucie was herself a translator of German works. She married Alexander Duff-Gordon. Her 1843 translation of Stories of the Gods and Heroes of Greece by Barthold Georg Niebuhr was erroneously ascribed to her mother.[6] The family history was recorded in Three Generations of English Women (1893), by Sarah Taylor's granddaughter, Mrs Janet Ross.[7]
Austin's literary translations were a principal means of financial support for the couple. She also did much to promote her husband's works during his life and published a collection of his lectures on jurisprudence after his death.[8] In 1833, she published Selections from the Old Testament, arranged under heads to illustrate the religion, morality, and poetry of the Hebrew Scriptures. "My sole object has been," she wrote in the preface, "to put together all that presented itself to my own heart and mind as most persuasive, consolatory, or elevating, in such a form and order as to be easy of reference, conveniently arranged and divided, and freed from matter either hard to be understood, unattractive, or unprofitable (to say the least) for young and pure eyes." In the same year she published one of the translations by which she is best known: Characteristics of Goethe from the German of Falk, Von Müller, and others, with valuable original notes, illustrative of German literature. Her own criticisms are few, but highly relevant.[2]
In 1834, she translated The Story without an End by Friedrich Wilhelm Carové, which was often reprinted. In the same year she translated the famous report on the State of Public Instruction in Prussia, addressed by Victor Cousin to Count Montalivet, minister of public instruction. In the preface she pleads eloquently for the cause of national education. "Society," she says, "is no longer a calm current, but a tossing sea; reverence for tradition, for authority, is gone. In such a state of things who can deny the absolute necessity of national education?" In 1839 she returned to the same subject in a pamphlet, originally published in the Foreign Quarterly Review. Arguing from the experience of Prussia and France, she urged the establishment in England of a national system of education.[2]
One of her last publications (1859) consisted of two letters addressed to the Athenæum on girls' schools and on the training of working women. In these she shows that she had modified her opinions. Speaking of the old village schools, she admits that the teachers possessed little book lore. They were often widows
better versed in the toils and troubles of life than in chemistry or astronomy.... But the wiser among them taught the great lessons of obedience, reverence for honoured eld, industry, neatness, decent order, and other virtues of their sex and stations,
and trained their pupils to be the wives of working men. In 1827 Mrs. Austin went with her husband to Germany and settled in Bonn. She collected in her long residence abroad materials for her work, Germany from 1760 to 1814, which was published in 1854. still holds its place as an interesting and thoughtful survey of German institutions and manners. In the autumn of 1836 she accompanied her husband to Malta, busying herself while there with investigations into the remains of Maltese art. On their return from that island, she and her husband went to Germany. Thence they passed to Paris, where thev remained until they were driven home by the revolution of 1848. In 1840 she translated, Ranke's History of the Popes, which was warmly praised by Thomas Babington Macaulay and Henry Hart Milman. When this translation was published, her intimate friend Sir George C. Lewis wrote to her saying, "Murray is very desirous that you should undertake some original work. Do you feel a 'Beruf' of this sort?" But she did not feel such a 'Beruf'; most of her subsequent works consisted of translations.[9]
After her husband's death in 1859 she produced a coherent and near complete edition of his Lectures on Jurisprudence, an enormous task that required assembling his scattered notes and marginalia. Her modesty regarding her contribution to her husband's publications was recognized only by later authors [10] She also edited the Memoirs of Sydney Smith (1855) and Lady Duff-Gordon's Letters from Egypt (1865).
Sarah Austin did not possess genius, but all she wrote is marked by nice discrimination and the touch of the true literary artist. Her style is clear, unaffected, and forcible. She had a high standard of the duties of a translator, and she sought to conform rigorously to it. "It has been my invariable practice," she herself said, "as soon as I have engaged to translate a work, to write to the author of it, announcing my intention, and adding that if he has any correction, omission, or addition to make, he might depend on my paying attention to his suggestions." She did much to make the best minds of Germany familiar to Englishmen. and she left a literary reputation due as much to her conversation and wide correspondence with illustrious men of letters as to her works.[9]
The following is a list of her principal works, besides those already named:
Sarah Austin died at Weybridge, Surrey, on 8 August 1867.[11] She was buried next to her husband in the Weybridge churchyard.[12] Her estate, valued at less than £5000, was proved on 28 August 1867, the executor being her son-in-law, Sir Alexander Cornewall Duff-Gordon.[11]