Translation, Authorship and the Victorian Professional Woman: Charlotte Brontë, Harriet Martineau and George Eliot by Lesa Scholl (review)

Although the three figures at the center of Lesa Scholl’s new monograph will be familiar to all students of Victorian literature, her approach to them concentrates on the less studied aspects of their work. In discussing Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, the book does pay attention to their fiction, but this attention is mediated through some of their other writings. In Brontë’s case, these are the translations and compositions she produced in Brussels as a student of Constantin Héger, and in Eliot’s, her translation of D. F. Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu (1835; The Life of Jesus, 1846), her essays and reviews, and the unpublished travel narratives found in her journals. In dealing with the more miscellaneous publications of Harriet Martineau, the book focuses on some of her early work—Illustrations of Political Economy (1832) and her travel books Society in America (1837) and Retrospect of Western Travel (1838)—but also articles in the Westminster Review from the 1850s and her translation of Auguste Comte’s philosophical works.

As her title suggests, Scholl is particularly concerned with the role translation played in these writers’ progress towards professional authorship as women. Drawing on contemporary translation theory, she emphasizes that the translator is by no means secondary to the original author. Hence when Brontë, Eliot, and Martineau translated male authors, they engaged to a greater or lesser extent in struggles with these writers and variously altered, supplemented, and abridged their works. In so doing, they worked towards finding their own voices as women writers. In Brontë’s case, the struggle with Héger was with both her original author and a real-life master, and this, Scholl argues, informed her presentation of Jane Eyre’s relations with Rochester and St. John Rivers and the dynamic of Lucy Snowe’s volatile relationship with Paul Emmanuel in Villette (1853). Eliot’s dealings with her masters were with Strauss expert Dr. Brabant and then with Strauss himself, and these are then reflected in Romola (1863) through the title character’s various entanglements with her male relatives and mentors, as well as in the inner conflict of Middlemarch’s (1872) Dorothea Casaubon over her pedantic husband. Martineau, meanwhile, emerged from subordination to mentor W. J. Fox, Westminster Review editor John Chapman, and her own brother James; she went on to negotiate and condense Comte’s prolix writings.

All three writers, too, became efficient and sometimes assertive women of business in handling their publishers, so Scholl, as well as necessarily covering Brontë’s notorious emotional investment in Héger, also foregrounds the professionalism of Brontë’s later role as an unofficial publisher’s reader for Smith Elder. A noteworthy aspect of Martineau’s work highlighted here is that although she—alone of the three writers covered—published an autobiography, her treatment of her family and personal life served mainly to contextualize her professional life as a writer.

Translation, Authorship and the Victorian Professional Woman argues too that the women’s experiences as translators widened their understandings and prepared them to mediate foreign cultures to British readers by exposing them to texts and ways of thinking outside their own culture. Such tendencies were also enhanced by the overseas travel that all three undertook; their purposes were various, but the effects were similar. Brontë spent a long period in Brussels to improve her education, and while the Belgian education system is presented quite negatively in her novels, she uses the fiction to hint at the deficiencies of British education as well, especially for girls. Eliot traveled to Europe to experience different ways of life and moral values, and the results are evident in her novels. Scholl’s more original point, however, is that when Eliot first went to the continent with G. H. Lewes and wrote about aspects of these travels in anonymous articles, she not only demonstrated the strengths and...