Louise Swanton Belloc

Louise Swanton Belloc (1796–1881), née Anne-Louise Chassériau Swanton, was a French writer and translator of Irish descent best known for introducing a number of important works of English literature to France. She is also remembered as a strong proponent of women's education, and was awarded a gold medal by the Institut in her twenties for her literary accomplishments.Marc-Antoine Jullien de Paris, the distinguished founder of the Revue encyclopédique (for which Swanton wrote), once referred to her as "a young person of brilliant talents".

Swanton, one of four children, was born in La Rochelle on 1 October 1796 to James Swanton (an Irish officer in the French service) and Marguérite-Louise-Joséphine Chassériau at her mother's ancestral home. Her parents ensured that she received an excellent education as a child, with a particular focus on English language and literature. Swanton began writing at seventeen, and her first translation — Patriarches, ou la terre de Chanaan (Patriarchal Times, or the Land of Canaan) by Adelaide O'Keeffe — was published in 1818. Shortly thereafter, she was engaged to write for the Revue encyclopédique, encouraged and mentored by its editor and founder Jullien, who praised her "compassionate zeal for the unfortunate".

In 1821, despite the protestations of her father (who considered the Bellocs too bourgeois), Swanton married the French painter Jean-Hilaire Belloc, with whom she had two daughters (Louise, 1822–1895, and Adelaide, 1828–1897) and a son (Louis, 1830-1872). Her son would later marry Bessie Rayner Parkes, a prominent English feminist and personal friend of Swanton's, and have two children, who became prolific writers in their own right: Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes (a novelist) and Hilaire Belloc (a poet and historian).

Within Swanton's large circle of acquaintances were to be found such prominent figures as Charles Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Victor Hugo, Emile Souvestre, Stendhal, Mary Elizabeth Mohl, Barthélemy St Hilaire, Lamartine, and Maria Edgeworth. She amassed a significant correspondence over her life, though much was damaged or destroyed during the Franco-Prussian War.

...
Wikipedia