November 25, 1884

Susanna Winkworth (August 13, 1820, to November 25, 1884) was a type of Victorian spinster, learned and concerned to help the poor. Her father provided her and her siblings with a comfortable setting in their youth and her, later, on the basis of his occupation as a silk merchant. Susanna's concern to be financially independent is given as the reason she began translating German scholarly works into English.

... Her first major project began as a translated memoir of the German historian and philologist Barthold Georg Niebuhr, but with encouragement from Elizabeth Gaskell and additional materials supplied by [Baron Christian Carl Josias von] Bunsen during her year-long visit to Bonn, the Life and Letters (1851) was largely original. A third volume of translated essays was added to the second edition (1852). In 1854 she published her translation of the Theologia Germanica, a devotional work admired by Luther, and in late 1856 a life and a selection of sermons by the fourteenth-century mystic John Tauler; Charles Kingsley provided prefaces to both volumes. ... The Winkworths [Susannah and her sister Catherine] worked closely together over their early translations, seeking to bring German religious devotion to an England already acquainted with David Friedrich Strauss's Das Leben Jesu. After Julius Hare's death Susanna also completed his Life of Luther (1855),....The two sisters worked together and shared the £150 fee for Bunsen's Die Zeichen der Zeit (translated as Signs of the Times, 1856). In 1858 Susanna published a small book entitled German Love, from the Papers of an Alien. The author was Professor Max Muller, who refused at that time to allow his name to appear.


[Susannah kept house for her brother until he married in 1861]

Although she was an invalid for some time after rejoining her father's household in Clifton, Susanna resumed translation with the three volumes of Bunsen's Gott in der Geschichte (as God in History, 1868-70). ....Susanna's faith had changed with her intellectual experience: once a sceptic, and later a Unitarian, she returned eventually to the Church of England, though she always preferred 'outspoken doubts and objections' to 'passive latent unbelief' ....

Catherine and Susanna did not marry, but their sister Emily did and in a letter to Susanna dated October 22, 1853, we hear a domestic and original voice. Susanna edited Catherine's letters after her death (Letters and Memorials of Catherine Winkworth, ( 1883) and included this letter. Emily writes:

Here have I been half-an-hour hunting for a key, instead of writing to you, and blaming Sarah and myself, and, after all, it turns out that Baby is to blame for the mischief. She is growing almost as good as a cat for bearing the sins of the household on her shoulders, for after being sought for in vain in pockets and drawers, it appeared in the very bottom of her play-basket, where she must have deposited it while I was cutting out her frock yesterday.

We end by quoting again from Susanna Winkworth's  Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article, the source of most of this post: 

Susanna was a philanthropist as well as author. In her district-visiting among the poor of Bristol, she was struck by their difficulty in obtaining decent lodgings. In 1872, therefore, she had several houses in Dowry Square repaired, and let them out in tenements; she also took over the management of a sanitary mission designed to acquaint the poor with disinfectant. The Dowry Square project proving unsatisfactory, she formed in 1874 the company which built Jacob's Wells industrial dwellings, assisting in their design and managing them herself until her death. She also took a great interest in the education of women and in 1878 [became a] member of the council of Cheltenham Ladies' College...

All this is utterly Victorian; it may be that few modern triumphs exceed the intellect and concern exhibited in lives like Susanna Winkworth's.