Constance Garnett eBooks

Constance Clara Garnett (née Black) (19 December 1861, Brighton, England – 17 December 1946, The Cearne, Crockham Hill, Kent) was an English translator of nineteenth-century Russian literature. Garnett was one of the first English translators of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov and introduced them on a wide basis to the English-speaking public. Garnett was the sixth of the eight children of the solicitor David Black (1817–1892), afterwards town clerk and coroner, and his wife, Clara Maria Patten (1825–1875). Her brother was the mathematician Arthur Black. Her father became paralysed in 1873, and two years later her mother died, from a heart attack after lifting him from his chair to his bed. She was initially educated at Brighton and Hove High School. Afterwards she studied Latin and Greek at Newnham College, Cambridge on a government scholarship, where she also learned Russian (partly from émigré Russian friends such as Felix Volkonsky ), and worked briefly as a school teacher. Her husband, Edward Garnett, whom she married in Brighton on 31 August 1889, was a distinguished reader for the publisher Jonathan Cape. Her son and only child, David Garnett, trained as a biologist and later wrote novels.