BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

A LIFE OF EDWARD GARNETT

Jonathan Cape, 448pp, £30, Oldie price £19.10 inc p&p Edward Garnett enjoyed a fifty-year career as a publisher’s reader, starting in the 1880s. He worked for several different publishing houses, discovering new authors and falling out with old ones. He nurtured Joseph Conrad and Henry Green, and edited both Lawrences, Galsworthy, Forster and hosts of others. DH Lawrence claimed the seed of Lady

Chatterley’s Lover was sown by Garnett once remarking, ‘I should welcome a description of the whole act.’ The publisher’s reader was married to the more famous Constance, who translated Tolstoy and other Russians. A mistress made a third in the marriage. ‘The publisher’s reader’s sympathies were with the modernists’

Such are the bare bones of a story told by first-time biographer Helen Smith. DJ Taylor in the Guardian described Garnett as operating ‘at a time when the gap between the finely wrought modernist masterpiece and Edward Garnett: inspirational the commercial bestseller was becoming an abyss’. The publisher’s reader’s sympathies were with the modernists ‘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’. Henrietta Garnett in the Literary

Review outed herself as the granddaughter of the publisher’s reader and described once coming across the manuscript of a play by him. ‘The characters were so unwieldy they could only have been performed by wooden spoons.’ She then learnt, from her father, of the man who ‘couldn’t write anything worth reading’ but could ‘inspire other writers to create the finest literature’.

John Carey in the Sunday Times noted that authors interested Garnett as much as books. His life, as a result, was ‘crammed with human interest’. All the reviewers agreed that Garnett was lucky in his biographer.