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Alma Strettell was the daughter of Laura Vansittart Neale and Reverend Alfred Baker
Strettell, who served as the British consular chaplain in Genoa (1851-74) and later
as rector of St. Martin’s Church in Canterbury. Alma was raised in Italy and came to
London after her older sister, Alice Vansittart Strettell (1850-1927), married art
critic Joseph Comyns Carr (1849-1916) in 1873. Carr was a champion of the
Pre-Raphaelite artists and co-directed the Grosvenor Gallery before founding the New
Gallery in 1888. A writer and fashion designer (known particularly for designing
Ellen Terry’s costume for Shakespeare's character Lady Macbeth), Alma’s sister Alice
became a prominent figure in London aesthetic circles, and was considered by some to
be the inspiration for “Mrs. Cimabue Brown,” one of the Aesthetes mocked in George du
Maurier’s cartoons in
James introduced the Carrs and Alma Strettell to the painter John Singer Sargent
(1856-1925), with whom Alma became a very close friend. They were both Wagner
enthusiasts and would spend hours at the piano playing and singing through his
operatic scores. Strettell was also a good friend of Mary “Queen” Mellen Palmer
(1850-1894), wife of General William Jackson Palmer (1836-1909), the founder of the
city of Colorado Springs. Strettell spent a lot of time there visiting Queen, and
wrote a profile of the new city for
In 1890 Strettell married the English painter Lawrence Alexander “Peter” Harrison
(1866-1937), with whom she had three children. After her marriage, she continued to
publish under her maiden name of Strettell. The couple, along with Peter’s brother,
Leonard Frederic “Ginx” Harrison (1870-1939), and members of the Palmer family,
frequently travelled with Sargent. He painted two portraits of Alma: an oil sketch
done by lamplight at her home circa 1889 and a watercolour done during one of their
vacations in the Alps in 1905. She also appears in several group studies by Sargent,
including
Strettell’s contribution of over forty translations to
Strettell’s 1894 collection of
In 1896 Strettell contributed four poems to
Strettell’s translations of the Provençal poetry of Frédéric Mistral (1830-1914), who
was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1904, were published with the 1907
English translation of his
Strettell translated a number of shorter lyrics that were set to music, including
poems by Paul Verlaine and Charles Baudelaire, as well as folk songs. Her translation
of Ferdinand Hiller’s hymn “Be Near Me Still” was frequently reprinted in collections
of sacred music throughout the twentieth century. When her friend Ethel Smyth
(1858-1944) received a license in 1909 to stage her radical opera
Alma Strettell was an accomplished and widely published poetic translator whose work, like that of many other translators, deserves more critical attention than it has hitherto received.
© Copyright 2013 Natalie M. Houston
Natalie M. Houston is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Houston.