Background For Love by Helen Wolff – a startling tale of romance from a great proponent of translated fiction

By Leigh WIlson, Professor of English Literature, University of Westminster

All publishing can be seen as a kind of translation. Sometimes from one language to another but also from one place to another, one time to another, one reader to another.

The writer and publisher Helen Wolff knew this. It shaped her life as one of the 20th century’s most important publishers, and it has shaped too the life of her novella, Background For Love, which has just been translated into English from German for the first time by her grandson, Tristram Wolff.

It is a startling work…

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