[5] According to a modern scholar, Austin "tended to be austere, reclusive, and insecure, while she was very determined, ambitious, energetic, gregarious, and warm.

"My sole object," she wrote in the preface, "has been to put together all that presented itself to my own heart and mind as most persuasive, consolatory, or elevating, in such a form and order as to be easy of reference, conveniently arranged and divided, and freed from matter either hard to be understood, unattractive, or unprofitable (to say the least) for young and pure eyes.

In 1839 she returned to the subject in a pamphlet, first published as an article in the Foreign Quarterly Review, where she argued from the experience of Prussia and France for the need to establish a national system of education in England.

[4] One of her last publications (1859) were two letters addressed to the Athenæum, on girls' schools and on the training of working women, which show she had modified her opinions.

But the wiser among them taught the great lessons of obedience, reverence for honoured eld, industry, neatness, decent order, and other virtues of their sex and stations," and trained their pupils to be the wives of working men.

She collected in her long residence abroad materials for her 1854 work Germany from 1760 to 1814, which still holds a place as an interesting, thoughtful survey of German institutions and manners.

In 1840 she translated Leopold von Ranke's History of the Popes, which was warmly praised by Thomas Babington Macaulay and Henry Hart Milman.

When the translation appeared, her intimate friend Sir George Cornewall Lewis wrote to her: "Murray is very desirous that you should undertake some original work.

[2] After her husband's death in 1859 Sarah Austin produced a coherent, near-complete edition of his Lectures on Jurisprudence, a huge task that required assembling his scattered notes and marginalia.

"It has been my invariable practice," she said, "as soon as I have engaged to translate a work, to write to the author of it, announcing my intention, and adding that if he has any correction, omission, or addition to make, he might depend on my paying attention to his suggestions."

She did much to make the best minds of Germany familiar to Englishmen and she left a literary reputation due as much to her conversation and correspondence with illustrious men of letters as to her works.