The literary giant Thomas Mann balked at a female translator, but he might well owe his standing in the Western canon to a little-known American woman, Helen Lowe-Porter. Based closely on historical source material, Jo Salas’s novel Mrs. Lowe-Porter sympathetically reveals a brilliant woman’s struggle to be appreciated as a translator and also to find her own voice in a culture of male dominance. Married to the charming classicist Elias Lowe, whom she met and fell in love with in Munich, the story weaves one woman’s journey as her husband Elias’s career soars, and her translation work earns Mann the Nobel Prize. The novel celebrates Helen Lowe-Porter as she learns to risk stepping out from the long shadow of the dominating men of her life to become a person of letters in her own right.
“A literary book in the best sense: about literature and its creation, and artistic in itself.”
–Jinny Webber, Historical Novel Society.