Ellen Marriage

Ellen Marriage (1865-1946) was an English translator from French, best known for producing most of the English texts in J. M. Dent's complete edition of Balzac's La Comédie humaine in the 1890s. She was born in Stratford, Essex, in August 1865 and died in Malvern, Worcestershire, on 23 December 1946; her married name was Garrett.

The Dent project, edited by the critic George Saintsbury, issued forty volumes of Balzac in English between 1895 and 1898. Marriage translated the largest share, with Clara Bell, Rachel Scott and others supplying the rest, and the series also appeared in the United States from the Gebbie Publishing Company of Philadelphia (1897-1900). Her translations include Eugénie Grandet (Dent, 1895), Old Goriot, Lost Illusions, Cousin Pons, The Country Doctor, The Magic Skin, Colonel Chabert, Gobseck, The Girl with the Golden Eyes and Albert Savarus. For some of the bolder novels she used the pseudonym "James Waring". Outside Balzac she translated Henri Murger and Marcel Prévost, revised her husband Edmund Garrett's English version of Ibsen's Brand, wrote on Balkan affairs and contributed to the suffragist paper Common Cause.

For collectors

Because her Balzac translations entered the public domain, they are reprinted widely by print-on-demand and independent publishers, and the modern paperbacks listed under her name are reprints rather than collectable editions. The editions of interest are the original Dent volumes of 1895 onwards, edited by Saintsbury, and the Gebbie sets printed in Philadelphia from 1897; check that a set is complete and that the title pages name the original publisher.