Garnett, Constance

Constance Garnett, née Constance Clara Black, (born December 19, 1861, Brighton, East Sussex, England—died December 17, 1946, Edenbridge, Kent), English translator who made the great works of Russian literature available to English and American readers in the first half of the 20th century. In addition to being the first to render Dostoyevsky and Chekhov into English, she translated the complete works of Turgenev and Gogol and the major works of Tolstoy.

In 1879, when advanced education for women was unusual, she won a scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge. After her marriage to the critic Edward Garnett and the birth of their son David, the future novelist, in 1892, she began her career as a translator with Ivan Goncharov’s Obyknovennaya istoriya (1847), which she rendered as Common Story (1894). Altogether she produced about 70 volumes of translations from Russian literature.