Elise Otté

Otté was born in Copenhagen on 30 September 1818, to a Danish father and an English mother called Mary Anne.

[1] In Copenhagen, her mother met and married a British man, English philologist Benjamin Thorpe,[3] and together, the family moved to England.

Thorpe taught his step-daughter several modern languages as well as Icelandic and Old English to the point that she was able to assist his grammatical work, but they clashed on a personal level and she found him oppressive.

She found life with him intolerable, however, and in 1849, she moved to Scotland and worked at the University of St Andrews translating for George Edward Day.

She translated a number of books from German by Alexander von Humboldt and another by the historian Johann Martin Lappenberg.

Title page to volume 1 of Alexander von Humboldt's "Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe," translated by Otté (1849)
Title page to volume 1 of Alexander von Humboldt's " Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe ," translated by Otté (1849)