Sarah Austin (translator) - Works

Works

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. 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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).