Helen Zimmern

Helen Zimmern (25 March 1846 – 11 January 1934) was a German-born British writer and translator. She was instrumental in making European culture more accessible in English.

Biography Zimmern and her parents emigrated in 1850 to Britain, where her father became a Nottingham lace merchant. She was naturalised on coming of age, as one of the three daughters of the merchant Hermann Theodore Zimmern and his wife Antonia Marie Therese Regina Zimmern. Her sister was the suffragist Alice Zimmern; the political scientist Alfred Eckhard Zimmern was a cousin.

The family moved to London in 1856. Her first appearance in print was a story for Once a Week. She was soon writing for the Argosy and other magazines. A series of children's stories first published 1869–71 in Good Words for the Young was reprinted as Stories in Precious Stones (1873) and followed by another collection, Told by the Waves. A series of tales from the Edda appeared in Old Merry's Monthly in 1872 before being republished.

In 1873 Zimmern began writing critical articles, particularly on German literature, for the Examiner. She also wrote for Fraser's Magazine, Blackwood's Magazine, the Athenaeum, the Spectator, St James's, Pall Mall Magazine, the World of Art, the Italian La Rassegna Settimanale and various German papers. Her advocacy and translations made European culture – whether of Germany, or increasingly Italy – accessible to English readers. She lectured on Italian art in Britain and Germany, and translated Italian drama, fiction and history.

By the end of the decade she had settled in Florence, where she was associated with the Corriere della Sera and also edited the Florence Gazette. In later life she defended Italian values against what she saw as the threat of German expansionism.

Works Books Stories in Precious Stones, Henry S. King & Co, 1873 Arthur Schopenhauer, his Life and his Philosophy, 1876 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, his Life and his Works, 1878 Maria Edgeworth , London : W.H. Allen, 1883 The Story Of The Nations. The Hansa Towns, London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1889 (ed.) The Discourses of Joshua Reynolds, 1887. Tales from the Edda Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema, London, George Bell & Sons, 1902 The Italy of the Italians', 1906 Tripoli and Young Italy, 1912 with Charles Lapworth (journalist) Italian Leaders of Today, London, Williams & Norgate, 1915 The New Italy, 1918

Translations Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, Selected Prose Works of G.E. Lessing, Ed. Edward Bell, Transl. by Helen Zimmer & E.C. Beasley, London, George Bell & Sons, 1879 Half-Hours with Foreign Novelists, 1880 (sections of various novels, with her sister Alice Zimmern) Ferdowsi, Shahnameh (The Epic of Kings), 1883, Iran Chamber Society, MIT Carmen, Sylva, Pilgrim sorrow : a cycle of tales, New York, Henry Holt & Co, 1884 Goldoni, Carlo, The Comedies of Carlo Goldoni, edited with an introduction by Helen Zimmern, London, David Stott, 1892 Lewes, Louis, The women of Shakespeare, New York, Putnam's & Ldon, Hodder, 1895 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, T. N. Foulis, 1906 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, T. N. Foulis, 1909 Cesare, Raffaele de, The last days of Papal Rome, 1850–1870, London, Constable, 1909 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, Laokoon, and How the ancients represented death, with Beasley, Edward Calvert, London, 1914