Clara Bell

Clara Bell (1834-1927) was an English translator who worked from eight languages. Born Clara Courtenay Poynter in Westminster, she was the daughter of the architect Ambrose Poynter and the sister of the painter Edward Poynter; in 1856 she married the banker Robert Courtenay Bell, with whom she had six children. Schooled in France, she had French and German early and taught herself Danish, Dutch, Italian, Norwegian, Russian and Spanish after she turned forty. She translated Georg Ebers's historical novels, Spitta's life of Bach, Maupassant, Loti, Ibsen, Perez Galdos and Tolstoy's War and Peace (1886), and she worked on the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. For George Saintsbury's edition of the Comedie Humaine, published by Dent from 1895, she translated about a dozen volumes of Balzac, among them At the Sign of the Cat and Racket.