Constance Garnett (1861–1946)

Constance Garnett, née Black, was born and raised in Brighton, England, 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, she 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 Russian authors such as Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Gogol. Subsequent translators have used her work as models for their own.