Eliza Foster

"In loving memory of Eliza Foster, formerly of Hilston Yorkshire who died at Bergamo, 8ber 4th, 1888 aged 86"

Eliza Vere Foster (Cheltenham, 25 July 1802 – Bergamo, 4 October 1888) was an English author and literary translator from Italian, Spanish and German.

Biography After studying classic and modern languages, and already a widow at 30, on 7 March 1832 in Chelwood Eliza married another widower, Jonathan Foster (Hilston in Holderness, Yorkshire, 1782 – Paris, 1859 ), with whom she had a son who later worked as deputy commissioner of customs in British India until he suddenly died there in 1870.

Eliza Foster worked as translator for publisher Bohn, most notably by translating and adding careful and abundant annotations to the first English-language translation (as "Mrs. Jonathan Foster") of the 5 volumes of Vasari's Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects in 1850–1851. According to professor Patricia Rubin of New York University, "her translation of Vasari brought the Lives to a wide English-language readership for the first time. Its very real value in doing so is proven by the fact that it remained in print and in demand through the nineteenth century."

She also translated from German (as "E. Foster") Leopold von Ranke’s History of the Popes for H. G. Bohn’s Standard Library (3 vols; 1847–48), in the preface of which she noted how the ‘noble office of the historian’ required ‘unwearied patience in research [and] a pure conscientiousness and profound respect for the sacredness of Truth’.

Works

(with Anna Maria Hall) Stories and Studies from the Chronicles and History of England (1847) (as "The Osmanli Abderahman Effendi") The Boatman of the Bosphorus: A Tale of Turkey (3 vols; London: T. C. Newby, 1854) (as "An Old Traveller") ‘Suggestions of Subject to the Student in Art by an Old Traveller’, in Art Journal (1856) (as "An Old Traveller") ‘Talk of Pictures and the Painters by an Old Traveller’, in Art Journal (1857) (as "An Old Traveller") Travels in Bohemia, with a Walk through the Highlands of Saxony (2 vols; London: T. C. Newby, 1857) (as "the Author of Travels in Bohemia") An Autumn in Silesia, Austria Proper, and the Ober Enns (London: T. C. Newby, 1859)

Translations (as "E. Foster") Leopold von Ranke’s History of the Popes for H. G. Bohn’s Standard Library (3 vols; 1847–48) (as "Mrs. Jonathan Foster") Vasari's Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (5 vols; 1850–51) (as "Mrs. Jonathan Foster") José Antonio Condé's History of the Dominion of the Arabs in Spain (1855)