Sarah Austin (translator)

For other people named Sarah Austin, see Sarah Austin (disambiguation).

Sarah Austin
Born	Sarah Taylor 1793
Died	August 8, 1867(1867-08-08) Weybridge, Surrey
Nationality	English
Occupation	Translator

Sarah Austin (1793, Norwich - 8 August 1867, Weybridge, Surrey) was an English editor and translator of German texts, the daughter of John Taylor, a yarn maker, hymn writer and member of the well-known Taylor family of Norwich.^[1]

Life

Sarah Austin, who was the youngest of her family, was educated under the direction of her mother, Susannah Cook, and, it is said, received both her beauty and her talent. She was remarkably handsome and attractive, and it caused some surprise in Norwich when she married the grave Austin. The marriage, which took place in 1820, was a union of rare intellectual sympathy, and one to which she brought an unusual share of devotion. During the first years of their married life they lived in Queen's Square, Westminster. Mrs. Austin's stately yet charming manners, her talk always full of information, interesting and sensible, if not brilliant, and her many-sided nature made her many warm friends. John Stuart Mill testified the esteem which he felt for her by the title of Mutter, by which he always addressed her. Her father, John Taylor, was a yarn maker of Norwich. Their friends included Dr. James Alderson and his daughter Amelia Opie, Henry Crabb Robinson, the Gurneys and Sir James Mackintosh.

Her great-grandfather, Dr John Taylor (1694–1761), had been pastor of the Presbyterian church there, and wrote a polemical work on The Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin (1738), which called forth treatises by Jonathan Edwards on original sin.

Sarah Taylor married John Austin at St George Colegate, Norwich, 24 August 1819. They lived in Queen Square, Westminster, where Mrs Austin, whose tastes, unlike her husband's, were extremely sociable, gathered round her a large circle, Jeremy Bentham, James Mill and the Grotes being especially intimate. She travelled extensively, namely to Dresden and Weimar.

The only child of the marriage, Lucie was herself a translator of German works. She became Lady Duff-Gordon after she married Alexander Duff-Gordon. She undertook the 1843 translation Stories of the Gods and Heroes of Greece, 1843 by Barthold Georg Niebuhr, after which it was edited by Sarah Austin and has come to be wrongly attributed to her.^[2] The family history was recorded in Three Generations of English Women (1893), by Sarah Taylor's granddaughter, Mrs Janet Ross.

Works

Austin's literary translations was a principal means of financial support for the couple, and she did much to promote her husband's works during his life and published a collection of his Lectures on jurisprudence after death.^[3] 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 many admirable 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 they are excellent, and are marked by that temperance and good sense which distinguished every line she wrote.

In 1834 she translated The Story without an End by Friedrich Wilhelm Carové, and this admirable translation has since been often republished. 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 a short-lived periodical, Cochrane's Foreign Quarterly Review. Arguing from the experience of Prussia and France, she urged the establishment in England of a national system of education.

One of her last publications (1859) consisted of two letter's 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. Some (chapters of it had previously appeared as articles in the Edinburgh Review and the British and Foreign Review.

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 this contribution had been overlooked by legal scholars, but later authors, on the evidence of letters from contemporaries, gave her greater recognition for the work, and for her influence on John Austin's career.^[4] She also edited the Memoirs of Sydney Smith (1855) and Lady Duff-Gordon's Letters from Egypt (1865). She died at Weybridge on the 8th of August 1867.^[5] Her estate was valued at less than £5000 and was proved on 28 August 1867; the executor of the will being her son-in-law, Sir Alexander Cornewall Duff-Gordon.^[5]

The following is a list of her principal works, besides those already named:

• Translation of a Tour in England, Ireland, and France by a German Prince, 1832. (Lond. 1832), after Pückler's Briefe eines Verstorbenen
• Translation of Raumer's England in 1835, 1836.
• Fragments from German Prose Writers, 1841.
• History of the Reformation in Germany and History of the Popes (1840), from the German of Leopold von Ranke
• Sketches of Germany from 1760 to 1814 (1854), dealing with political and social circumstances during that period.
• Translation of François Guizot on the Causes of the Success of the English Revolution, 1850.
• Memoirs of the Duchess of Orleans, 1859.
• Lady Duff Gordon's Letters from Egypt, edited by Mrs. Austin, 1865.
• Letters of Sydney Smith, 1855 (second volume of Lady Holland's Life and Letters).

Criticism

This book, by which she is best known, 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.

In 1861 she wrote, as a preface to a new edition of The Province of Jurisprudence Determined, a memoir of her husband full of pathos. From that time to 1863 she was laboriously engaged in preparing for the press a large mass of manuscript notes of his lectures, and in that year appeared Lectures on Jurisprudence, or the Science of Positive Law. She was meditating the preparation of a new edition when she died on 8 August 1867 at Weybridge of heart disease.

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.

References

1. ^ Taylor, Edward (1826). Obituary - Mr. John Taylor. The Monthly Repository of Theology and General Literature vol xxi, 482-494.
2. ^ Shattock, Joanne (1999). "Early Nineteenth Century Prose". The Cambridge bibliography of English literature (3, revised ed.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 2081–2. ISBN 0-521-39100-8. 
3. ^ "John Austin". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, CSLI, Stanford University. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/austin-john/. Retrieved 5 November 2010. 
4. ^ Hershey, Sylvia R. (Apr 1896). "Notable Women: Sarah Austin - A Modern Theodora". The Century; a popular quarterly 0051 (6): 952–954. http://digital.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=cent;cc=cent;rgn=full%20text;idno=cent0051-6;didno=cent0051-6;view=image;seq=962;node=cent0051-6%3A1;page=root;size=s;frm=frameset. 
5. ^ ^{a b} Calendar of the Grants of Probate and Letters of Administration made in the Probate Registries of the High Court of Justice in England. London, England: Principal Probate Registry. 1867. p. 159. 

•  Macdonell, John (1885). "Austin, Sarah". In Leslie Stephen. Dictionary of National Biography. 02. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 
•  Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). "Austin, Sarah". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 

Ross, Janet (1893). Three Generations of English Women: Memoirs and Correspondence of Susannah Taylor, Sarah Austin, and Lady Duff Gordon. London: T. Fisher Unwin. http://books.google.com/books?id=Xj8JAAAAIAAJ. 

Attribution

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: "Austin, Sarah". Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900. 
 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 

External links

Persondata
Name	Austin, Sarah
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1793
Place of birth
Date of death	8 August 1867
Place of death	Weybridge, Surrey