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  • Translation, Authorship and the Victorian Professional Woman: Charlotte Brontë, Harriet Martineau and George Eliot by Lesa Scholl
  • Annmarie S. Drury (bio)
Translation, Authorship and the Victorian Professional Woman: Charlotte Brontë, Harriet Martineau and George Eliot, by Lesa Scholl; pp. 213. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011, £55.00, $99.95.

In Translation, Authorship and the Victorian Professional Woman, Lesa Scholl studies the influence of foreign worlds, both textual and actual, on the writerly lives of Charlotte Brontë, Harriet Martineau, and George Eliot. “Translation” has an expansive meaning in this volume. Scholl writes of the “translational skills” these authors bring “to other literary and professional endeavors” (187), of the ways that travel enabled them to regard British life “in a displaced, translational way” (132), and of the “translational” quality of characters invented by Brontë and Eliot. As the term implies, and as Scholl demonstrates, the intercultural and interlinguistic negotiations that these women undertook as travelers and literary translators asked to be transported into other projects, notably the endeavors of literary representation and self-presentation in the marketplace. Yet the import of these negotiations has for the most part escaped scholarly attention. A virtue of this study lies in its elucidation of translation as a category crucial for comprehending the writings and careers of these authors.

Scholl’s conceptualization of translation as a form of relationship between instructor and student is key to the volume. She convincingly extends this relationship from the actual men in her authors’ lives (their brothers, for example) to the authors they encountered as translators (especially, Auguste Comte for Martineau and David Friedrich Strauss for Eliot) to their fictive representations of such relationships. Eliot’s Romola (1862–63) and Middlemarch (1871–72) and Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Villette (1853) are of particular importance to Scholl in this regard. The opening chapters move fluidly into and out of fictions, but could use clearer cues guiding that movement; nonetheless one admires the conceptual basis that enables such fluidity. The argument expressed in this movement, implicitly yet in quite specific terms, has great value: that discovery of the porous boundaries between actual and fictive is essential to understanding the oeuvres of these writers, and that translation gives us a tool for finding them.

It is wonderful to read this scholar’s adumbrations of how the experiences of travel and translation, linked as forms of cultural negotiation, contribute to the formation of authorial selves. Scholl analyzes essays Brontë wrote in Belgium under the tutelage of Constantin Héger to identify strategies she developed for expressing her own views in a pedagogical context dominated by imitation. She also demonstrates how [End Page 542] Martineau, in Eastern Life (1848), claims authorial agency by acknowledging her failures as an interpreter of culture and how “as she grasps for equivalencies” between English and Egyptian worlds, she posits new connections between them (151). Scholl shows us Eliot in conversation with Ludwig Feuerbach on marriage as she translates Essence of Christianity (1854) and Martineau meticulously crafting a posture toward Comte as she introduces him to readers in English.

Frustration has a role in all these stories. We see Brontë driven at last to argue with Héger over the nature of inspiration and Eliot sickened by the task of contending with Strauss and with her own responses to his thought. Sometimes Brontë, Martineau, and Eliot can scarcely bear the creators toward whom they are drawn, and this exasperated condition makes things happen, as Scholl shows, inflecting the translated text and the translator’s own authorial posture. There are also writerly lessons to be learned. Drawing a complex parallel among her writers, Scholl shows how translation provided strategies for “maintain[ing] the structure, but transform[ing] the meaning” within texts (57).

In these discussions, Scholl overturns common assumptions: that a writer’s turn to translation comprises a loss of dynamism, for example, or that the significance for a writer of a sojourn abroad varies in accordance with the cultural exoticism of the destination and the duration of the stay. Scholl’s careful focus on the experiential aspects of such events for Brontë, Martineau, and Eliot becomes a basis for extending and challenging the ideas of...

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