Katharine Prescott Wormeley

Katharine Prescott Wormeley (1830–1908) was born in Ipswich, England, the daughter of a Royal Navy officer, and emigrated with her family to the United States as a girl. During the Civil War she served in the hospital transport service of the United States Sanitary Commission, nursing the wounded aboard ships on the York and Pamunkey rivers during the 1862 Peninsula Campaign, an experience she recorded in The United States Sanitary Commission (1863) and her wartime letters. From the 1880s she turned to translation and rendered most of Balzac's Comédie Humaine into English — some forty volumes in all, published first by Roberts Brothers and, after 1898, by Little, Brown and Company — and wrote A Memoir of Honoré de Balzac (1892) to accompany it; she also translated Molière, Saint-Simon, Dumas and Daudet. She never married and died at Jackson, New Hampshire.