Lucie Austin commenced her literary life with translations, her earliest work being Barthold Niebuhr's "Studies of Ancient Grecian Mythology", 1839. In 1844 she translated Wilhelm Meinhold's "Mary Schweidler, the Amber Witch", a narrative dressed up as a 17th-century chronicle, and concocted to discredit rationalist methods of biblical criticism. In 1845 she published "The French in Algiers, from the German and French of C. Lamping", and in 1846 "Narrative of Remarkable Criminal Trials, by P. J. A. von Feuerbach". Sir Alexander Duff-Gordon, in conjunction with his wife, translated in 1847 "Memoirs of the House of Brandenberg, by L. von Ranke".