David Garnett

This article is about the Bloomsbury author. For the science fiction author, see David S. Garnett. For the Anglican priest, see David Garnett (priest).

David Garnett
File:David Garnett, 1920.jpg David Garnett in 1920
Born	(1892-03-09)9 March 1892 Brighton, East Sussex, UK
Died	Montcuq, Lot, France
Spouse	Rachel Marshall Angelica Bell (1942 – 1981; his death)

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.

Early life

Garnett was born in Brighton, the only child of the writer, critic and publisher Edward Garnett and his wife Constance, a translator of Russian. Through his father, he was descended from a writer and a philologist who both worked at what is now the British Library, then within the British Museum. Bloomsbury and the life of letters were embedded in David.

As a conscientious objector in the First World War, Garnett worked on fruit farms in Suffolk and Sussex with his lover Duncan Grant.

Work

A prominent member of the Bloomsbury Group, Garnett received literary recognition when his novel Lady into Fox, an allegorical fantasy, 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.

Personal life

His first wife was the illustrator Rachel (Ray) Marshall (1891–1940), sister of the translator and diarist Frances Partridge. He and Ray, whose woodcuts appear in some of his books, had two sons, one of whom (Richard) went to Beacon Hill School. Ray died relatively young of breast cancer.

Garnett was bisexual, as were several members of the artistic and literary Bloomsbury Group, and he had affairs with Francis Birrell and Duncan Grant. On 25 December 1918 he was present at the birth of Grant's daughter by Vanessa Bell, Angelica, who was accepted by Vanessa's husband Clive Bell. Shortly afterwards he wrote to a friend "I think of marrying it. When she is 20, I shall be 46 – will it be scandalous?" On 8 May 1942, when Angelica was in her early twenties, they did marry, to the horror of her parents. She did not find out until much later that her husband had been a lover of her father.

The Garnetts lived at Hilton Hall, near St Ives in Huntingdonshire, where David Garnett kept a herd of Jersey cows.

They had four daughters: in order, Amaryllis, Henrietta, and the twins Nerissa and Frances; eventually the couple separated. Amaryllis Garnett (1943–1973) was an actress who had a small part in Harold Pinter's film adaptation of The Go-Between (1970). She drowned in the Thames, aged 29. Henrietta Garnett married Lytton Burgo Partridge, her father's nephew by his first wife Ray, but was left a widow with a newborn infant when she was 18; she oversaw the legacies of both David Garnett and Duncan Grant. Nerissa Garnett (1946–2004) was an artist, ceramicist, and photographer. Fanny (Frances) Garnett moved to France where she became a farmer.

Later life

After his separation from Angelica, Garnett moved to France and lived in the grounds at the Château de Charry, Montcuq (near Cahors) in a house leased to him by the owners, Jo and Angela d'Urville. He continued to write and lived there until his death in 1981.

Works

The cover of Dope-Darling: A Story of Cocaine.

• 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) — short 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
• Selected Letters of T. E. Lawrence (1952) — 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) — short 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)

Notes

References

Sources

• Heilbrun, Carolyn G. (1961). The Garnett Family. London: Allen & Unwin — also on Richard Garnett, Jeremiah Garnett, Edward Garnett, Constance Garnett.

External links

• Works by David Garnett at Hathi Trust
• Works by David Garnett at Project Gutenberg
• Works by David Garnett at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)