Welcome to Translating Jane Austen! I’m Gillian Dow, Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Southampton. I have long-standing research interests in Romantic-Period translation, in women translators, and in translations of Jane Austen’s novels in the nineteenth century and beyond. The many and varied ways in which Austen’s novels were rewritten and repacked for audiences from Paris to Berlin, Madrid to Stockholm, in Asia and South America and more have long fascinated me. I have read a great many French translations – in some nineteenth-century cases, more ‘adaptations’ than translations – and I have looked at copies of many, many more translations into languages I have no hope of ever reading. Austen’s global reception – and her journey to a firmly-established place in ‘World Literature’ – is a story worth writing. But it is not an easy story to map out.
The idea for this project came from my basic frustration that there is no single place to go for a complete list of translations of Austen’s fiction. David Gilson does wonderful work documenting translations in his Austen Bibliography. But he freely admits that for the twentieth century in particular, he is by no means comprehensive (in fact, recent research on nineteenth-century periodicals show that he is not comprehensive for that earlier period either). Later bibliographers Barry Roth and Deborah Barnum do not attempt to provide information about new translations at all. Despite sterling work by Anthony Mandal and Brian Southam and the contributors to their edited collection, and by Valerie Cossy, Vitana Kostadinova, Marie Sørbø, Lucile Trunel and many more, the picture is still far from complete.
Enter the University of Southampton’s summer internship programme, which employed one of our students in the English Department, Asha Parekh, for a 12-week period under my supervision in the summer of 2025. Asha has begun exploring what it might mean to document, to digitise, and to map out translation activity across the globe, and through time. What’s here is just a beginning, but we hope it will give visitors to the website a glimpse of what happens to Jane Austen – sometimes considered the most English of English authors – when she travels abroad. This site is very much a work in progress – we do not claim to provide complete lists, of anything. That’s something for the future. In the meantime, we encourage you to get in touch with comments and suggestions.
Before I hand over to Asha, some thanks. To the translators, and specialists in translation theory that came to The Global Jane Austen conference hosted at the University of Southampton in July 2025, and who responded with suggestions and ideas, we are grateful for your input, and we hope to stay in touch. Lizzie Dunford at Jane Austen’s House and Kim Simpson at Chawton House responded with their typical generosity to our request to view, and photograph, the translations of Austen held in their collections. The Research Software Group at the University built the database you can access via this website.
Over to Asha, who has spent the summer of 2025 in Southampton immersed in all things Austen Abroad – a fitting 250th birthday tribute to our most famous local author!
Gillian Dow
