David Garnett
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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David Garnett (9 March 1892 – 17 February 1981) was a British writer and publisher. As a child, he had a cloak made of rabbit skin and thus received the nickname "Bunny", by which he was known to friends and intimates all his life.
Life
Garnett was born in Brighton as the only child of Edward Garnett and Russian translator Constance Garnett. As a conscientious objector in the First World War, he worked on fruit farms in Suffolk and Sussex with his lover, Duncan Grant. A prominent member of the Bloomsbury Group, he received literary recognition when his novel Lady into Fox was awarded the 1922 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. He ran a bookshop near the British Museum with Francis Birrell during the 1920s. He also founded (with Francis Meynell) the Nonesuch Press. He wrote the novel Aspects of Love (1955), on which the later Andrew Lloyd-Webber musical was based.
His first wife was illustrator Rachel "Ray" Marshall (1891-1940), sister of Frances Partridge whose woodcuts appear in some of his books. He and Ray had two sons, but she died relatively young of breast cancer.
Although Garnett was primarily heterosexual, he had affairs with Francis Birrell and Duncan Grant. He was present at the birth of Grant's daughter, Angelica Garnett (née Bell), on 25 December 1918, and wrote to a friend shortly afterwards, "I think of marrying it. When she is 20, I shall be 46 -- will it be scandalous?". When Angelica was in her early twenties, they did marry (on 8 May 1942), to the horror of her parents.
They had four daughters (Amaryllis, Henrietta, and twins Nerissa and Frances), but later separated. Their eldest daughter Amaryllis Garnett (1943-1973) was an actress. Henrietta Garnett, their second daughter, eventually married Burgo Partridge, her father's nephew by his first wife Ray; she oversees the legacies of both David Garnett and Duncan Grant.
After his separation from Angelica, Garnett moved to France and lived at the Chateau de Charry, Montcuq (near Cahors), where he died in 1981.
Works
- Turgenev (1917)
- Dope Darling (1919) novel, as Leda Burke
- Lady into Fox (1922) novel
- A Man in the Zoo (1924) novel
- The Sailor's Return (1925) novel
- Go She Must! (1927) novel
- The Old Dove Cote (1928) stories
- A Voyage to the Island of the Articoles by André Maurois (1928) translator
- Never Be a Bookseller (1929) memoirs
- No Love (1929) novel
- The Grasshoppers Come (1931)
- A Terrible Day (1932)
- A Rabbit in the Air. Notes from a diary kept while learning to handle an aeroplane (1932)
- Pocahontas (1933)
- Letters from John Galsworthy 1900-1932 (1934)
- Beany-Eye (1935)
- The Letters of T. E. Lawrence (1938) editor
- The Battle of Britain (1941)
- War in the Air (1941)
- The Campaign in Greece and Crete (1942)
- The Novels of Thomas Love Peacock (1948) editor
- The Golden Echo (1953) autobiography (i)
- The Flowers of the Forest (1955) autobiography (ii)
- Aspects of Love (1955)
- A Shot in the Dark (1958)
- A Net for Venus (1959) novel
- The Familiar Faces (1962) autobiography (iii)
- Two by Two (1963) novel
- 338171 T. E. (Lawrence of Arabia) by Victoria Ocampo (1963) translator
- Ulterior Motives (1966) novel
- The White/Garnett Letters (1968) correspondence with T. H. White
- Carrington: Letters & Extracts From Her Diaries (1970)
- First 'Hippy' Revolution (1970)
- A Clean Slate (1971)
- The Sons of the Falcon (1972) novel
- Purl and Plain (1973) stories
- Plough Over the Bones (1973) novel
- The Master Cat (1974)
- Up She Rises (1977)
- Great Friends. Portraits of Seventeen Writers (1979)
- David Garnett. C.B.E. A Writer's Library (1983)
- The Secret History of PWE : The Political Warfare Executive, 1939-1945 (2002)
