Clara Bell

Clara Bell (1834–1927), born Clara Poynter in Westminster, London, the eldest child of the architect Ambrose Poynter and sister of the painter Edward Poynter, later President of the Royal Academy, was educated in France and became fluent there in French and German; she took up several further languages, among them Russian, Italian and Spanish, only after the age of forty. Married to Robert Courtenay Bell, she supported herself for decades as one of the busiest literary translators of her day, working from French, German and other languages into English for authors including Balzac, Maupassant, Huysmans, Ibsen and Georg Ebers. Under the general editorship of George Saintsbury she translated the bulk of Balzac's Comédie Humaine for the Gebbie Publishing Company's Novels of Balzac (Philadelphia, 1897–99), working alongside the translators Ellen Marriage and R. S. Scott; her contributions to that edition included The Commission in Lunacy. She died in 1927.