Best known as the replacement translator of Marcel Proust's work following the death of C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, Sydney Schiff, who published most of his work under the name Stephen Hudson, is rarely mentioned in lists of prominent writers. In a review in the New Statesman and Nation (21 May 1949), however, Walter Allen claimed that Hudson "added something to the English novel, and no account of our fiction during the past thirty years would be complete without reference to him." His biographer, Theophilus E. M. Boll, asserts that "Stephen Hudson is second to none in the honesty and lucid art with which he has given reality to his novels of insight into individuation." To this comment Boll adds the praise of many contemporary authors and critics, including Edwin Muir, Katherine Mansfield, Thomas Mann, Aldous Huxley, Humbert Wolfe, Richard Aldington, W. Somerset Maugham, and Louis Kronenberger.

Until 1962, when Hudson's widow, Violet...