In light of two constituent elements of Foucault’s author function – attribution and transgressivity of and in the language act – and Bourdieu’s structural censorship, the author examines the translation of Flaubert’s Salammbô produced by the American-born translator residing in London M. French Sheldon who was denied attribution for her work in Great Britain. The literary field decried the translator’s attempts to block the publication of rival translations in her drive for transauthor recognition. While her translation was not censored by the authorities, it was censured by the field. Her apparently inadequate translation skills left her unable to reproduce the stylistic and grammatical innovation of Flaubert’s source text; moreover, at times she did not shy away from producing the novel’s violence and veiled eroticism, a questionable decision on the part of a Victorian upper-class woman, who was expected to assume a norm-enforcing role in the Victorian structural censorship hierarchy. This article suggests that the translation and its translator were “punished” because the former did not adequately reproduce the English linguistic norm and the latter did not submit to her female role in Victorian society.