ABSTRACT
The industry of translating German literature and criticism into English began early in the nineteenth century and is dominated by two names, Carlyle and Coleridge. A third name which should rank with theirs is that of Anna Jameson's close friend, Sarah Austin.1 These three scholars spearheaded an industry still in its infancy, but already sufficiently successful and lucrative in the 1830s for Jameson to believe she too might try her hand at some German translation, with the hope of interesting a publisher. Sarah Austin's role as a translator and reviewer in the early nineteenth century was an important one. One reviewer for the North American Review, wrote that she 'has done more, perhaps, than any living writer, to bring the German mind into contact with the English' ('Austin's German Prose Writers', 504). Because she was a translator Sarah Austin's name is often missing from biographical and bibliographic guides like The Dictionary of British Women Writers (1989) and The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English (1988), although the Oxford Guide to British Women Writers (1993) provides a comprehensive entry. Moreover while her husband's fame rests on the publication of his The Province of jurisprudence Determined (1861) and Lectures on Jurisprudence (1863) it is not generally known that these works owe their published existence to Sarah's efforts on his behalf after his death in 1859 (Hamburger, 225-8).
