The Mabinogion (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

Charlotte Guest, neé Bertie, was an extraordinary woman whose life practically spanned the nineteenth century, from 1812 to 1895. She grew up near Stamford, Lincolnshire, and was the daughter of the ninth earl of Lindsey. A gifted linguist, she married the widower Josiah John Guest, twenty-seven years her senior, owner of the Dowlais Iron Company in South Wales (one of the largest ironworks in the world), and Member of Parliament for Merthyr Tydfil. Having settled in her new home, she not only took an active part in running the iron works, but also promoted schools for the education of the working classes in the area, for both male and female pupils. But most importantly, she set about learning Welsh, and in so doing came into contact with Welsh literary figures of the period. Through them she obtained access to texts from the Red Book of Hergest, a medieval Welsh manuscript dated to c.1400, and on New Year’s Day, 1838, she set about translating a collection of tales that came to be known as the Mabinogion. She was fired by her love of the Middle Ages and of Arthurian Romance, but she also had another motive—she wanted to show to the English-speaking world, the “colonizers,” that the “colonized” were civilized and in possession of a noble literary heritage, of “venerable relics of ancient lore” as she claims in her dedication. Once the translation was finished, however, her interest in Welsh literature, too, came to an end. In 1855, three years after the death of her husband, she married her eldest son’s tutor, Charles Schreiber, who was fourteen years her junior. In his company she traveled on the Continent and embarked on a new project, collecting eighteenth-century ceramics, as witnessed today in the prestigious Schreiber Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Charlotte Guest died in 1895, eleven years after the death of her second husband, and was buried in Canford, Dorset, where the family owned a large estate.