Wormeley, Katharine Prescott (1830–1908)

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Wormeley, Katharine Prescott (1830–1908)

English-born American translator, author and philanthropist. Born on January 14, 1830, in Ipswich, Suffolk, England; died of pneumonia on August 4, 1908, in Jackson, New Hampshire; daughter of Ralph Randolph Wormeley (a rear admiral) and Caroline (Preble) Wormeley.

Selected writings:

The Other Side of War (1889); The United States Sanitary Commission: A Sketch of Its Purpose and Work (1864); A Memoir of Honoré de Balzac (1892).

Selected translations:

Honoré de Balzac's La Comédie Humaine (40 vols., 1885–96); The Works of Balzac (1899); Paul Bourget's Pastels Man (1891, 1892), various works by Alexander Dumas (1894–1902), plays by Molière (1894–97), The Works of Alphonse Daudet (1898–1900), Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon (1899), Letters of Mlle. de Lespinasse (1901), Diary and Correspondence of Count Axel Fersen (1902), Sainte-Beuve's Portraits of the Eighteenth Century (1905).

Katharine Prescott Wormeley was born in Ipswich, England, in 1830. Her mother Caroline Wormeley was a daughter of an East India merchant from Boston and was also the niece of Commodore Edward Preble of the U.S. Navy. Her father Ralph Wormeley, a sixth-generation Virginian and a great-nephew of Edmund Randolph, who had served as George Washington's attorney general, spent his childhood in England. He eventually became a British subject and retired from the Royal Navy as a rear admiral. Politically liberal in his views, Ralph bequeathed a sense of social responsibility to his children. Katharine spent most of her childhood in various genteel environments in Europe; she lived in London from 1836 to 1839, followed by three years in Switzerland and France, and lived again in London from 1842 to 1847. Spending the following year again in France, her family returned to the United States in 1848, planning an extended visit. When her father died in 1852, Katharine and her family remained in the United States.

At the onset of the Civil War, Wormeley was one of the first to initiate and participate in relief work in Newport, Rhode Island, where her family was then living. In July 1861, she helped form and direct the local Women's Aid Society. Assisting the families of soldiers who were experiencing rough economic times, Wormeley secured a government contract to make clothing, which furnished work for the wives and daughters of soldiers. Under her direction, the women made more than 50,000 shirts during the winter of 1861–62. After leaving her position in the Women's Aid Society, Wormeley became a member of the hospital transport service of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, caring for the sick and wounded on hospital ships on the York and Pamunkey rivers. Much later, in 1889, she published the letters she had written during this period under the title The Other Side of the War.

Wormeley returned home in August 1862 and, the following month, accepted the position of lady superintendent of Lowell General Hospital, at nearby Portsmouth Grove, Rhode Island. Her duties at the hospital included directing the female nurses and the dietary kitchen, as well as the laundry and linen departments. During this time she was aided by assistant superintendents, including Sarah Chauncey Woolsey and Sarah's cousins Jane Stuart Woolsey and Georgeanna Woolsey . After a year of difficult and stressful work, however, Wormeley became ill, resigned her position, and returned home to Newport to recover.

In the postwar years, Wormeley concentrated on charity work. One of her prominent achievements during this time was the founding of the Newport Charity Organization Society in 1879. She also administered classes in sewing and domestic work for impoverished women. In 1887, Wormeley founded an industrial school for girls where they could learn cooking, dressmaking, household work, and sewing. Wormeley was the school's director and financial supporter until it became a part of Newport's public school system in 1890.

Although she gave much of her time to charitable efforts, Wormeley is best known for her translations of noted French writers, particularly Honoré de Balzac, to which she devoted herself from the early 1880s to the end of her life. She also wrote A Memoir of Honoré de Balzac (1892). According to Dictionary of American Biography, Wormeley had made the translation of his voluminous (40 volumes) La Comédie Humaine such an obsession that "she apparently came to look upon its author as a personal charge" and suffered no criticism of him or his work. An accomplished French scholar with a profound understanding of French culture, Wormeley translated Balzac's work without losing its spirit or sense.

She spent the last years of her life in Jackson, New Hampshire, and died there on August 4, 1908, from pneumonia after breaking her hip from falling on the steps of her house. Her cremated remains were buried near Newport, Rhode Island, beside the grave of her father.