Edward Garnett

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Edward Garnett (1868–1937) was an English writer, critic and a significant and personally generous literary editor, who was instrumental in getting D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers published. His father Richard Garnett (1835-1906) was a writer and librarian at the British Museum. His wife was Constance Garnett, known for her translations of Russian literature; the writer David Garnett was their son.

Garnett apparently had little formal education, but educated himself by reading very widely. He gained a high reputation at the time for a mixture of good sense and sensitivity in relation to contemporary literature. His influence though his encouragement of leading authors exceeded by far that of his own writing. His literary contacts and correspondents spread far and wide, from Petr Kropotkin to Edward Thomas.

He worked as an editor and reader for the London publishing houses of T. F. Unwin Ltd., Duckworth and Co., and then Jonathan Cape. He brought together in 1898 Joseph Conrad, an Unwin author to whom he acted as a mentor as well as a friend, and Ford Madox Ford; they collaborated in the first few years of the twentieth century. Garnett befriended D. H. Lawrence, and for a time influenced him in the direction of realist fiction. He also had a role in getting T. E. Lawrence's work published. One of his failures was to turn down for Duckworth James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in 1915. He was a strong supporter of John Galsworthy, and The Man of Property in the Forsyte Saga was dedicated to him. He also championed American writers Stephen Crane and Robert Frost and Australia's Henry Lawson, and helped the Irish writer Liam O'Flaherty.

His play The Breaking Point was not allowed a licence for dramatic performance in London under the censorship system of the time (Lord Chamberlain's office). Its publication was permitted, and in 1907 Garnett published the play, which dealt with an unmarried mother, together with an open letter to the censor. The letter was in fact written by the critic William Archer. This was one battle in a campaign being waged at the time, under the generalship of Bernard Shaw, to free the stage.

[edit] Works

An Imaged World (1894)
The Art of Winnifred Matthews (1902)
The Breaking Point, a Censured Play. With Preface and a Letter to the Censor (1907)
Hogarth (1911)
Tolstoy: His Life and Writings. (1914)
The great war in 1916, a neutral's indictment (1917) with Louis Raemaekers, H. Perry Robinson, and M. B. Huish
Turgenev (1917) biography
Papa's War and Other Satires (1918)
Friday Nights; Literary Criticisms and Appreciations (1922)
Letters from W. H. Hudson, 1901-1922 (1923) editor
Letters from Joseph Conrad 1895-1924 (1928) editor
The trial of Jeanne d' Arc and other plays (1931)
Letters from John Galsworthy 1900-1932 (1934) editor
Edward Thomas: A selection of letters to Edward Garnett (1981 reprint)