Isabel Hapgood

Isabel Florence Hapgood (1850-1928) was an American translator and journalist. Born in Boston, she studied at Miss Porter's School until 1868 and then taught herself the Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages. Her first translations, of Tolstoy and Gogol, appeared in 1886, and she went on to translate Hugo, Renan, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Gorky and Bunin. She spent 1887 to 1889 in Russia, where she met Tolstoy, and wrote Russian Rambles (1895) and A Survey of Russian Literature (1902). For twenty-two years she wrote for the New York Evening Post and the Nation. In 1906 she published her Service Book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic Church, still in use in English-language Orthodox worship. Her version of Leskov's tale, titled The Steel Flea, was printed at the Merrymount Press in Boston in 1916.