David Garnett

This article is about the British writer and publisher born in 1892. For the British science fiction writer born in 1947, see David S. Garnett .

David Garnett

David Garnett (born March 9, 1892 in Brighton , East Sussex , † February 17, 1981 in Montcuq , Lot ) was a British writer, publisher and member of the Bloomsbury Group .

Live and act

David Garnett was the only son of the publishing editor Edward Garnett and the translator Constance Garnett ; his grandfather was Richard Garnett .

Garnett wrote grotesque novels in which he exercised social criticism by contrasting humans and animals. His first literary success was the novel Lady Into Fox , in which an English housewife suddenly turns into a vixen, which makes their marriage difficult for everyone involved and represents an original adaptation of the werewolf theme . For the work he received the Hawthornden Prize in 1923 .

With A Man In The Zoo , Garnett followed up with a book about a man who can be exhibited in the zoo. He ran a bookstore in London with Francis Birrell in the 1920s . Together with Francis Meynell he founded Nonesuch Press . For some time he worked for the British Ministry of Information , a propaganda agency during the Second World War, and supplied a. a. the text to that in the series Puffin Picture Books published best-selling book about the Battle of Britain ( The Battle of Britain , PP21).

1955 published the novel Aspects of Love , on which the musical of the same name by Andrew Lloyd Webber is based.

In his youth he had a homosexual relationship with Duncan Grant . In 1921 he married his first wife Rachel Alice "Ray" Marshall (1891-1940), sister of Frances Partridge . With her he had two sons; the older, Richard Duncan Carey Garnett (* 1923), was a publisher's editor and later wrote a biography of his grandmother Constance Garnett. In 1942 he married the daughter of his ex-boyfriend Duncan Grant, Angelica Bell . The couple had four daughters. After separating from Angelica, he moved to France and lived in the Chateau de Charry, Montcuq (near Cahors ) until his death in 1981 .

Works (selection)

• Turgenev (1917)
• Lady into Fox (1922), German 1952: My wife the fox
  • Lady to fox . Translation Marie Hummitzsch. Zurich: Dörlemann, 2016
• A Man in the Zoo (1924), German 1952: The man in the zoo
  • Man in the zoo . Translation Marie Hummitzsch. Zurich: Dörlemann, 2017
• The Sailor's Return (1925)
• Go She Must! (1927)
• Never Be a Bookseller (1929) memoir
• No Love (1929)
• The Grasshoppers Come (1931). The grasshoppers are coming
• A Terrible Day (1932)
• Pocahontas (1933)
• Beany-Eye (1935)
• Aspects of Love (1955)
• A Net For Venus (1959)
• Purl And Plan (1973)

literature

• Carolyn G. Heilbrun: The Garnett Family , Allen & Unwin, London 1961.
• Silvia Hess-Schmid: David Garnett. To recognize his design world . Dissertation, University of Zurich 1942.
• Sarah Knights: Bloomsbury's outsider: a life of David Garnett , London: Bloomsbury Reader, 2015, ISBN 978-1-4482-1545-4

Web links

• David Garnett: Lady into Fox in Project Gutenberg ( currently not available to users from Germany ) (English)