Mary Ann saw for herself just how ineffectual Brabant really was when, at the beginning of 1844, she took over Rufa’s translation of Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu. The new Mrs Hennell had found the work too onerous to combine with married life and suggested to her sister-in-law Sara that Mary Ann might like to step in. This was a delicate situation. Having watched Rufa carry off Charles Hennell, was Mary Ann being offered her cast-off translation as some kind of compensation? If this suspicion did go through her mind, Cara and Sara surely pressed her to set it to one side. They were both aware of how desperately she needed a substantial piece of work to stretch and exhaust a mind prone to pull itself to pieces. Mary Ann’s previous attempts at sustained intellectual work – the ecclesiastical chart, the translation of Vinet – had faltered through her own failure to get started. At the end of her life she told John Cross of her ‘absolute despair’ at this point of achieving anything.40 The big attraction of the Strauss was that the translation was already commissioned – by the Radical MP Joseph Parkes – so there would be an external authority driving her to complete the project.
On taking up Strauss, Mary Ann asked Dr Brabant, via Sara Hennell, for some work he was rumoured to have done already on the concluding section. When the translation finally arrived it turned out, true to form, to be scrappy and incomplete. In any case, Mary Ann soon realised that trying to follow someone else’s translation was ‘like hearing another piano going just a note before you in the same tune you are playing’.41 Putting aside the doctor’s jottings, she started again from scratch.
Translating Strauss was to dominate her life for the next two years. Unable to concentrate for more than four hours a day, she evolved the method she was to follow when writing fiction of working from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. This meant that she managed to cover about six pages of Strauss a day. Sara, who had turned down the translation before it had been offered to Rufa, agreed to act as Mary Ann’s editor. Letters went back and forth between London and Coventry discussing various points of translation as they arose. When a section of the work was completed, Mary Ann mailed it to Sara to read through and check against the original. This reliance on the post caused constant worries about late and non-arriving packages. ‘I sent a parcel of MS to you on Friday. Have you received it? I thought I should have heard that it had arrived safely when you sent the proof,’ was a typically anxious communication between Mary Ann and Sara during a particularly difficult stretch.42
The translation was a remarkably difficult piece of work, which would have taxed the most scholarly, university-educated brain. There were fifteen hundred pages of what Mary Ann described despairingly as ‘leathery’ German, with many quotations in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. At times it was only Sara’s brisk enthusiasm that kept her going: ‘Thank you for the encouragement you sent me – I only need it when my head is weak and I am unable to do much.’43 Even more tricky than finding literal meaning was the teasing out of nuance. Was it ‘Sacrament’ or ‘The Sacrament’? Was ‘Dogmatism’ quite what Strauss meant by ‘das Dogma’?44 And then there were pedantic, Rebecca Franklin-ish bickerings about English. Was ‘as though’ as good as ‘as if’? Was it ‘finally’ or ‘lastly’?45
Although the title of the work was The Life of Jesus, it is the subtitle – Critically Examined – which provides the key to Strauss’s methodology. He takes each episode in the life of Jesus, as told in the four Gospels, and shows how it ‘may be considered not as the expression of a fact, but as the product of an idea of his earliest followers’.46 Steeped in the Jewish tradition of the returning Messiah, Jesus’s disciples shaped their understanding of their master’s life to fit inherited expectations. Strauss’s aim was to unpick that process and show how the ‘historical’ Jesus had been created out of a series of Evangelical ‘mythi’.
There was nothing in Strauss that was new or strange to Mary Ann. She had long since come to the conclusion that Jesus was a gifted human teacher and not the Son of God. However, she did worry about the theologian’s relentlessly totalitarianising approach, which insisted on subsuming inconvenient exceptions into the arc of his narrative. ‘I am never pained when I think Strauss right,’ she wrote in the autumn of 1845, ‘but in many cases I think him wrong, as every man must be in working out into detail an idea which has general truth, but is only one element in a perfect theory, not a perfect theory in itself.’47 The crucifixion was a case in point. Strauss had to concede that the Jews’ expectations of the Messiah did not include one who was to suffer and die, let alone rise again. So where did this part of the Gospel narrative come from? Strauss was obliged to conclude weakly that ‘Jesus Himself may have reached the conclusion of the necessity of his death … or the whole idea might have been added after his death.’48
It was this stripping away of all that was ‘miraculous and highly improbable’ from the Gospels which oppressed Mary Ann the deeper she went into Das Leben Jesu. All her life she had read the Bible not simply as the revelation of God, but as the metaphorical language of her own experience. The quotations in her letters to Maria Lewis were not just for pious show, but a way of describing complex inner states. To be robbed of that language – for that is what she experienced Strauss as doing – was to be deprived of a vital part of herself. Her disillusionment with Das Leben Jesu became particularly acute at the beginning of 1846, when she tackled the detailed analysis of the crucifixion and resurrection. Describing herself as ‘Strauss-sick’, she fled to Rosehill, avoiding the first-floor study at Bird Grove, where she was supposed to be getting on with her work. She was, reported Cara in a letter to Sara, deathly pale and suffering from dreadful headaches.49 To pull herself through this Slough of Despond she placed a cast of the Risen Christ together with an engraving in a prominent place by her desk. This was her way of reasserting the mystery and hopeful joy of the New Testament narratives which continued to sustain her long after she had given up orthodox Christianity.
Once the work was finished, except for routine worries over proofs, Mary Ann’s spirits began to rise. At the end of May 1846 she headed off to see Sara in London with the promise that ‘we will be merry and sad, wise and nonsensical, devout and wicked together!’50 It was not simply liberation from the daily grind of translation that gave her such a delightful feeling of relief. The fact that the book was coming out at all was reason for celebration. Only a year earlier it had looked as though Strauss might go the same way as the ecclesiastical chart and Vinet – into oblivion. In May 1845 Joseph Parkes’s assurance that he would finance the publication started to look shaky and Mary Ann began ‘utterly to despair that Strauss will ever be published unless I … print it myself. I have no confidence in Mr Parkes and shall not be surprized if he fail in his engagement altogether.’51
In the end, the book did come out, published by John Chapman of Newgate Street. Mary Ann received only twenty pounds for her two years’ work and her name does not appear on the title page – or indeed anywhere else. None the less, its impact on her life was huge. Das Leben Jesu was a supremely important book and the name of its translator could not fail to circulate among well-informed people. Mary Ann’s meeting with the publisher John Chapman, while staying with Sara in summer 1846, was the catalyst for her move to London three years later and the start of her journalistic career. And, of course, the translation brought her to the notice of Strauss himself, who provided a preface in which he described her work as ‘accurata et perspicua’.52 In 1854 they finally met, thanks to the fussy ministrations of none other than Dr Brabant. Whether by chance or not, the good doctor popped up on the train on which