Sarah Austin ( Taylor; 1793 – 8 August 1867) was an English editor, linguist and translator from German-language books. She did much to make Germany familiar to the English.
Life
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. Her education was overseen by her mother, Susannah Taylor. 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 an attractive woman. She caused 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 he felt for her by the title of Mutter, by which he always addressed her. Jeremy Bentham was also in their circle. She travelled widely, for instance to Dresden and Weimar. 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. It was conducted solely in letters – she did not meet him until their passions had cooled."
The only child of the Austins' marriage, Lucie, was likewise 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. The family history was recorded in Three Generations of English Women (1893), by Sarah Taylor's granddaughter, Janet Ross.
Works
Austin was initially encouraged as an author by the American John Neal, who sent her first works to the Edinburgh Review. Her writing and literary translations soon became important sources of income for her and her husband. She did much to promote her husband's works in his life and published a collection of his lectures on jurisprudence after he died. 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," she wrote in the preface, "has been 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, Austin 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 Marthe Camille Bachasson, Count of Montalivet, minister of public instruction. The preface 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 subject in a pamphlet, first published as an article in the Foreign Quarterly Review, where she argued from the experience of Prussia and France for the need to establish a national system of education in England.