December 19, 1861

Constance Garnett (December 19, 1861 to December 17, 1946) was not the first to translate famous Russian writers into English. Frederick Whishaw, for example, translated Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, with a publication date of 1887. But she is the translator we remember, and many of the 70 volumes of Russian classics she provided are still in print.

Her father-in-law, Richard Garnett was Keeper of Printed Material at the British Museum, and she worked as a librarian elsewhere before her marriage. So it is not surprising that what today is an obscure English drama was part of the literary world she inhabited. I am thinking of a play by the Irish dramatist, Charles Macklin: "The Man of the World". It was already 100 years old late in the century.

A drama critic contemporary with Garnett wrote of the play in Sixty Years of the Theater: An Old Critic's Memories (1916): John Ranken Towse said:

The comedy itself possesses no extraordinary merit, but the central figure is a vital bit of satirical writing, which makes very exacting demands upon the comic and tragic powers of the interpreting actor. Briefly, Sir Pertinax is an unscrupulous, heartless, miserly hypocrite, who has achieved wealth and station by his mean subserviency and his disregard of every decent and honorable instinct. Finally, all his schemes fail, his self-degradation recoils upon him, and his end is as tragic as that of Sir Giles Overreach. The fact that the part is in the Scotch dialect increases its difficulty.

Now, the comic character, Sir Pertinax Macsycophant, needs a bit of introduction. At the end of the 19th century, Constance and Edward Garnett could name their cat, 'Sir Pertinax," and know their friends would get the witty joke.

February 19, 1868

Edward Garnett, the son of Richard Garnett, British museum librarian, was the father of writer David Garnett, and the husband of Constance Garnett, famous for her translations from the Russian. Edward Garnett was born February 19, 1868, according to Britannica and died February 21, 1937. (Other sources have other dates.) Britannica describes Edward Garnett as an "influential English critic and publisher's reader who discovered, advised, and tutored many of the great British writers of the early 20th century."

Another article states the significance of Edward Garnett was because of his position as "the writer and editor [who] promoted Joseph Conrad and DH Lawrence and [thereby deserved] recognition as a great literary tastemaker..."

'The Nobel-winning Galsworthy, Conrad and the Lawrences (DH and TE) all benefited from his advice,....the aspiring authors who caught his attention could expect to have their work chewed over, their excesses reined in, their published books mentioned in the literary articles he wrote for the Speaker and the Nation periodicals. They would be invited to lunch at his favourite Soho restaurant, the Mont Blanc...'

Helen Smith’s biography of Edward Garnett stresses:

'the qualities he searched for and admired in a writer ...[were] “the ability to suggest the intangible from the palpable; a willingness to shake the reader out of his or her settled perceptions, and the facility to make a small, apparently insignificant detail reveal the depths of a situation”. These are crucial distinctions, for they gesture at the position Garnett took on the highly contested cultural battlegrounds of the 1900s where his presence was conspicuous. Broadly speaking, he operated at a time when the gap between the finely wrought modernist masterpiece and the commercial bestseller was becoming an abyss; the taste of the vast middlebrow public keen on the “materialist” fiction of a Bennett or an HG Wells would make highbrow critics despair.
....
'Garnett’s sympathies were with the modernists, and their forebears – he wrote an excellent book about Turgenev – but the constant struggle between his responsibility to the employers who paid his wages and his hankering for reticence, subtlety and concision set up an inevitable tension in his work. ...

'If Garnett’s critics sometimes accused him of liking “controversial” books merely for their controversy, then his personal life was similarly unorthodox. Married at 21, he spent most of his adult life in a menage a trois involving his wife, Constance, the distinguished translator of Tolstoy and Chekhov, and a woman named Nellie Heath. Three early works of [Edward Garnett's] fiction sank without trace, and the four plays to which he put his name... were...reckoned lifeless....'

A biography--An Uncommon Reader: A Life of Edward Garnett, Mentor and Editor of Literary Genius, (2017) authored by Helen Smith is our source for the above.

nd therein we learn that a 12 year old Edward Garnett was deeply concerned about the Ireland of his time, for one thing, because of all the homeless cats resulting from their masters being murdered.