Edward Garnett

Edward William Garnett (1868–1937) was an English writer, critic and 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, married on 31 August 1889; the writer David Garnett was their son, born 9 March 1892.

Garnett had only a few years formal education at the City of London School, leaving at the age of 16, but he educated himself further by reading widely. He gained a high reputation at the time for a mixture of good sense and sensitivity in relation to contemporary literature. His influence through 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. Fisher Unwin, Gerald Duckworth and Company, 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.

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