Isabel Florence Hapgood

Isabel Florence Hapgood (November 21, 1851 – June 26, 1928) was an U.S. writer and translator of Russian texts.

Hapgood was born in Boston, the descendant of a long-established New England family. She studied Germanic and Slavic languages, specializing in Orthodox liturgical texts. She was one of the major figures in the dialogue between Western Christianity and Orthodoxy. She traveled through Russia between 1887 and 1889. While there, she spent several weeks with the famous Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy on his country estate. She wrote a lengthy article detailing her visit and observations of the man trying to live his ideal life for The Atlantic magazine, it was published in 1891.

She was in Moscow when the revolution broke out in 1917, but was able to escape and returned to the United States.

Despite Count Tolstoy's admonition that she should marry, Ms. Hapgood never married and had no children. She died in New York.

Veneration

Hapgood is honored with a feast day on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church (USA) on June 26.

Own works

• The Epic Songs of Russia (1886)
• Russian Rambles (1895)
• A Survey of Russian Literature (1902)
• Little Russian and St. Petersburg Tales (Date Unknown)

Translations

• Childhood, Boyhood, Youth (1888), and Sevastopol (1888) by Leo Tolstoy
• The Epic Songs of Russia. (Date unknown)
• Taras Bulba and Dead Souls by Nikolay Gogol
• Les Misérables (1887), Notre Dame de Paris (1888), and Toilers of the Sea (1888) by Victor Hugo
• Recollections and Letters (1892) by Ernest Renan
• The Revolution of France Under the Third Republic (1897) by Pierre de Coubertin
• Foma Gordyeef (1901) and Orloff and His Wife (1901) by Maksim Gorky
• The Brothers Karamazov (1905) by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• The Seagull (1905) by Anton Chekhov
• Service Book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic (Greco-Russian) Church (1922)
• The Village (1923) by Ivan Bunin

External links

• Works by Isabel Florence Hapgood at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Isabel Florence Hapgood in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Orthodoxwiki: Isabel Hapgood
• Isabel Hapgood - by Fr. Alexey Young (a brief biography)
• A Linguistic Bridge to Orthodoxy: In Memoriam Isabel Florence Hapgood - by Marina Ledkovsky. A lecture delivered at the Twelfth Annual Russian Orthodox Musicians Conference, October 7–11, 1998, Washington, D.C. (PDF)