Ellen Marriage

Ellen Marriage (26 August 1865 – 23 December 1946) was an English translator from French, notably of Balzac's novels. She put an effort into readability and accuracy that was unusual in translators of her period.

Marriage was born in Stratford, Essex, into the Quaker family of James Haworth Marriage (1839–1913), a confectionery maker, and his wife, Mary, née Brookfield (1835–1899). All four children were sent to Quaker schools – she and her two sisters to The Mount School, York. On leaving she went to work as an invoice clerk, but she was already reading widely in English and French and doing some writing.

Marriage met the English journalist Edmund Garrett (1865–1907) while they were both patients at a Suffolk sanatorium in 1901, he with tuberculosis, she with neurasthenia. They were married on 26 March 1903 and moved first to St Ives, Cornwall, then to Plympton in Devon. Marriage returned to the Home Counties after Garrett's death. In the 1920s she was living in Notting Hill. In the early 1930s she moved to Malvern, Worcestershire, where she died.

A. R. Waller, a critic who was a neighbour of the Marriage family, suggested she do translations when he proposed to the London publisher J. M. Dent that his firm embark on the first complete edition of Balzac's immense novel cycle La Comédie humaine. Hitherto only a few of the novels had appeared in the United Kingdom singly. George Saintsbury was appointed editor and work began. Forty volumes duly appeared between 1895 and 1898, although five others were omitted as too shocking for Victorian English tastes. Marriage, under her own name and under the pseudonym James Waring for some of the "bolder works", did most of the translation, except for 13 volumes done by Clara Bell (1834–1927), and one volume done by Rachel Scott.

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