When the English translator Constance Garnett visited Ertel in the summer of 1904,[2] she was much impressed by Natalie, who began studying at Saint Petersburg University the following year.
[5] Through her interest in Theosophy, Natalie met John "Jack" Nightingale Duddington, who had been appointed Rector of Ayot St Lawrence in 1905.
Among the writers that she translated, Nikolai Berdyaev, Semyon Frank, and Nikolay Lossky were intellectuals expelled by the Bolsheviks from Russia in 1922 on what is known as the Philosophers' ships.
(For instance, in 1908 the Stage Society put on The Bread of Others by Turgenev, "translated by J. Nightingale Duddington" – who at this point knew no Russian.)
Richard Freeborn, emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of London, wrote of Duddington's translation of Oblomov, for instance, that "in its particular sensitivity to the subtlety of Goncharov's Russian, in its liveliness and its elegance, it has about it a freshness of manner that admirably matches the same enduring quality in the original.
"[11] Duddington was the first to translate several works by Russian authors into English, including Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin's The Golovlyov Family, and a volume of Anna Akhmatova's Forty-Seven Love Poems.
[1] In 1916 she, along with philosophers Beatrice Edgell, and Susan Stebbing were some of the first women to be elected to serve on the executive committee of the Aristotelian Society.