Unidentified painter, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The image I’ve included here is the Duke of Sully, a French Protestant courtier and advisor in the court of Henry IV of France, also known as Henry the Great. You might wonder why I’ve included him here, in the Lennox blog. The answer is that his memoirs (a set of five volumes describing most of his service to Henry IV and that king’s support of Protestantism) were translated into English by Lennox from L’Ecluse’s French edition of Sully’s memoirs (published 1745). Her translation was published in 1751. Lennox’s translation of Sully remained steadily in print for over 100 years after its original debut, making it possibly the most popular of her works (and very nearly the one with the most extant copies — the result remains to be definitively determined.)
I don’t know whether Lennox expected the result of her translation efforts on Sully. Certainly translations of the period didn’t often advertise who the translator was, and neither did the first few editions of Sully. She came to be closely associated with this work, however, and before long was featured as translator on the title pages of the various editions. This alone was not the biggest reason to include Sully in this post, however. I am including him because I feel as though I am chained to him through long familiarity, consisting largely of how long I’ve been working on entering copies of her translation of Sully into my database.
For the record, as of today I am still on map 1 of 3 of extant copies in terms of inputting data, and I’m already at over 300 records with a total of 5 different editions that I’ve worked with so far. I have not yet entered the raw data from The Female Quixote, but I can say that the total number of volumes of Henrietta that I’ve located (pre verification) is only 134. I expect that this will be well over 1000 copies by the time I’m done. It’s in the running to be Lennox’s most popular work, bar none, in terms of the sheer number of editions AND in the number of copies that have been preserved. I’m still so early on in this project that I’m hesitant to form any declarative statements regarding analysis, but what I can saw without fear of contraditions is that there are a whole whacking lot of Lennox’s Sully books out there, and I’m looking forward to seeing more of them in person someday.
Current Data Category: Memoirs of the Duke de Sully translation
# of entries in this category to date: 324
# of entries in the database so far: 876 and counting
Lennox Bibliography Project 