An identical twin (her sister Olive Classe was also a translator),[1][2] she was educated at Girton College, Cambridge, where she read English, with papers in French and Italian and gained a First.
She translated the correspondence of George Sand, and work by leading French-speaking writers of her own time including Marguerite Duras, Amin Maalouf, Julia Kristeva, Michel Quint, Jean Anouilh, Michel Tournier, Jean Genet, Alain Bosquet, Réjean Ducharme, Élisabeth Roudinesco, and Philippe Sollers.
[3] During the same decade, they collaborated on the script for a biographical film about Ibn Sa'ud, the founder of Saudi Arabia and (with Harold Pinter), she wrote an adaptation of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.
Extensive excerpts from these conversations were published in German by Berlin's quarterly Lettre international (Es war wie ein Blitz… vol.
The English original of these excerpts remains unpublished, but other fragments have appeared in Modernism/modernity (Barbara Bray: In Her Own Words, Volume 18, Number 4, November 2011).