Become a Translator! Formations of an Im/Possible Persona

Drawing both on the history of women’s education and on the interdisciplinary concept of the persona, this chapter discusses the discourses and practices that framed and limited young middle-class women’s chances of studying and becoming a learned person in late nineteenth-century Europe. It argues that in connection with the middle-class ideology of a woman’s place, a double standard of male and female scholarship prevailed. Considering the links between accepted models of femininity and new forms of professional identity, the chapter shows the development of new, if hidden, female personae at the fringes of academe, for example the persona of the supportive wife of a male academic or of the translator.