This thesis attempts to write a memoir of someone I do not remember – my grandfather, the translator Eric Sutton (1886-1949). The Preface introduces him and my reasons for wanting to make a study of him. One is the mystery of his dual identity, as the witty, depressive, but loveable man I found in his letters, and as a ‘black sheep’, edited out of the family story. Soon after the start of my project, his equivocal status was partly explained by an unprovable suggestion from a family member that he sexually abused my mother. Trying to discover the truth about what sort of man he was is a main motive of this thesis. My materials include the letters in my family archive, my mother’s unpublished memoir, his appearances in other people’s memoirs, letters in other archives, some family traditions, and his 69 translations from French and German.

Chapter 1 forms the ‘literature review’. In search of a methodology for my memoir, it first discusses the now well-researched interlinking of biography, autobiography and creative writing during the Modernist period, in various forms of ‘auto/biografiction’, and some of their present-day descendants. It then examines the newly burgeoning – and academically neglected – genre of ‘family memoir’. I conclude that ‘family memoir’ is closer to the model I need than ‘auto/biografiction’.

The following chapters explore the possibilities of the ‘family memoir’ approach, with my search for information as part of the narrative. Though there are some frustrating ‘dead ends’ – his editorship of the Oxford Magazine, his possible intelligence career in WW1 – my evidence comes together to illustrate his life more vividly than I had expected. One reason for this is the quality of the writing both in Eric’s letters and in my mother’s memoir and letters; they share wit and literary influences, making this also a study of the passing of style from father to daughter.

As well as investigating family memoir, this thesis contributes to two other branches of academic research: translation, and letters or ‘epistolarity’. The chapters on his translations concentrate on two books, by Vivant Denon and Jean-Paul Sartre, which illuminate the question of identity – in books as well as people: a central problem of this thesis. They also track critical trends in translation and sketch the complete about-turn in criteria for ‘good’ translation since Eric’s time. His translation of Sartre’s great novel The Reprieve (1945) illuminates the English disease of bowdlerisation, and its startling effect on this book.

Chapter 8, ‘The events of 1940’, tells the story through letters of Eric’s attempt (successful at the time) to prevent my mother marrying my father in 1939-40. Chapter 9 studies the letters to and from his second wife, Jenny, then in the WRNS, both as examples of letters in wartime, and for what they can add to my portrait of him. The Conclusion asks whether I have answered the questions with which I began.