Karin Stephen

Born in York on 12 October 1889, she was the daughter of Mary Whitall Smith Costelloe and the art historian Bernard Berenson, and she grew up within the wide-reaching Pearsall Smith family. She studied at Newnham College, Cambridge, and began her career as a writer and translator before turning to medicine and psychoanalysis.

She married Adrian Stephen in 1914, linking her to the Bloomsbury world, and later trained as a doctor and psychoanalyst. She became known for translating Sigmund Freud into English and for writing clearly about psychology for general readers, including books such as Psychoanalysis and Medicine and The Wish to Fall Ill.

Her work helped introduce psychoanalytic thinking to English-speaking audiences in a practical, readable way. She died in London on 12 April 1953, leaving behind a body of writing that sits at the meeting point of literature, medicine, and modern psychology.