Constance Garnett (1861–1946)

Constance Clara Black was raised in Brighton, the sister of suffragist and writer Clementina Maria Black and mathematician Arthur Black. She was educated at home by a governess and later attended boarding school. She studied the classics at Cambridge University, where she also learned Russian. In 1889, Constance married Edward Garnett, a noted writer and critic, with whom she had a son, David "Bunny" Garnett (he became a novelist and a member of the Bloomsbury Group). Mrs. Garnett worked as the librarian at the People’s Palace in London. She visited Russia twice prior to World War I and was inspired to produce the first English translation of Ivan Gontcharoff’s A Common Story in 1894. She continued with translating classic works by authors such as Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Gogol. Subsequent translators have used her work as models for their own.