Economic Imperatives in Charlotte Lennox's Career As a Translator

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Chapter 9 “[S]‌ome employment in the translating Way”: Economic Imperatives in Charlotte Lennox’s Career as a Translator

Marianna D’Ezio

Although motivated by a genuine passion for writing, money was a constant and pressing issue in Charlotte Lennox’s (1730?-1804) career as a writer, as well as in her personal life. In 1747 she married Alexander Lennox, an employee of the printer William Strahan, but their union was unfortunate, especially with regards to financial matters. Lennox eventually achieved much-coveted recogni- tion with the success of her novel The Female Quixote, published anonymously in 1752. However, her work as a translator is an aspect of her literary career that has not been adequately researched, and indeed began as merely a way to overcome the distressing financial situation of her family. This essay examines Lennox’s activity as a translator as impelled by her perpetual need for money, within a cultural milieu that allowed her to be in contact with the most influential intellectuals of her time, including Samuel Richardson, Samuel Johnson, Giuseppe Baretti (who likely taught her Italian), and David Garrick, who produced her comedy Old City Manners at Drury Lane (1775) and assisted her in the publication of The Female Quixote. Diamonds may do for a girl, but an agent is a woman writer’s best friend Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street (1984) ∵

In the last years of her life, Charlotte Ramsay Lennox received an anonymous letter. Its purpose was to reprimand one of the most successful British women writers of the eighteenth century for having become inappropriately shabby, noting that “Several Ladies who met Mrs Lennox at Mr Langton’s were astonish’d

Figure 9.1 Portrait of Charlotte Lennox (née Ramsay) by Francesco Bartolozzi, after Sir Joshua Reynolds, stipple engraving, published 1793. copyright: national portrait gallery of london.

to see a Gentlewoman’s hands in such a horrid order”. The author of the letter continued to advise that she “for God’s sake wash them & rub back the skin at the roots of the Nails”, and ironically – if not cruelly – closes the short epistle by signing it as “a friend” who is pitilessly offering “a hint”.1 Lennox had re- cently applied to the Royal Literary Fund to obtain financial support for what another anonymous correspondent described, in a letter of recommendation

1 Anon. to Charlotte Lennox, possibly between 1795 and 1801, MS Eng 1269 (47), Houghton Library, Harvard University, reprinted in Charlotte Lennox. Correspondence and Miscella- neous Documents ed. Norbert Schürer, Lewisburg 2012, 245–46. Before Schürer’s first com- prehensive edition, Lennox’s correspondence could only be found in Miriam Rossiter Small, Charlotte Ramsay Lennox: An Eighteenth-Century Woman of Letters, New Haven 1935, and especially Duncan Isles, “The Lennox Collection” Harvard Library Bulletin, xviii/4 (October 1970), 317–44; xix/1 (January 1971), 36–60; xix/2 (April 1971), 165–86; xix/4 (October 1971), 416–35.