Clara Courtenay Bell (née Poynter; 1835–1927) was an English translator fluent in French, German, Danish, Dutch, Italian, Norwegian, Russian, and Spanish,[1][2] noted for her translations of works by Balzac, Casanova, Huysmans, Ibsen, and Maupassant, as well as by Louis Couperus, Georg Ebers, Benito Pérez Galdós, Ernst Haeckel, Pierre Loti, Helmuth von Moltke, and others.
[3] She was educated in France, where she became fluent in French and German; she did not acquire her knowledge of the other languages until after her fortieth birthday.
One of her sons was Charles Francis Bell, who oversaw the Fine Art Department of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford[4] and another was Edmund Hamilton Bell, first curator of the John G. Johnson Collection at what is now the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
[6][7] According to an entry in Book News in 1890: "The productions [i.e. translations] she values most are her scientific works, much of which she did for Professor Thistleton Dyer and other English botanists, and for Professor Richter's great work of the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, until then unpublished.
This had to be done from the original MSS [manuscripts] in the cramped and minute handwriting of the great artist, all of which, to add to the difficulty, was written backwards.