Where Garnett improved on the traditional talent-spotting role of publisher’s ‘reader’ was in his enthusiasm and attention to detail. As Smith demonstrates, the aspiring authors who caught his attention could expect to have their work chewed over, their excesses reined in, their published books mentioned in the literary articles he wrote … Well-researched, neatly written and not above the occasional flash of sly humour, The Uncommon Reader is, necessarily, the study of a circle, or rather a milieu, as much as the man who stares doggedly from its cover. Its ultimate destiny, you fear, is to be cherry-picked for information about its famous names. But Smith does her best for Garnett, sees the point of the aesthetic wars he fought and the value of some of his comparative literary judgments.
In her sparkling biography An Uncommon Reader, Helen Smith brilliantly brings to life the emerging aesthetics of contemporary English letters. Born in 1868 into a bookish middle-class Victorian family (his father was a librarian at London’s British Museum), Garnett had an extraordinary influence upon the creation and reception of some key works of the next century … When Garnett got it right, he set off a chain reaction that still reverberates in the novel. Without Conrad, Lawrence and the other early modernists whose writing Garnett rescued from the slush pile, the many works that they in turn influenced—including not only those of Woolf but also those of Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Doris Lessing, Saul Bellow, V.S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Margaret Atwood and J.M. Coetzee, to take an arbitrary sample—might never have existed. That’s quite a legacy.
Smith’s book gives us a perspective on a time when the book industry was undergoing an earlier moment of what we would now call media disruption. As with the birth of the literary agent, which was also a phenomenon of the 1890s, positions like Garnett’s would become crucial as the business pivoted from books to, well, books, but quite unlike those published just a few years earlier … A formidable translator of Tolstoy, Dostoevesky, and Turgenev, Constance Garnett may have exerted as great an influence on the reading tastes of England as did Edward. In a biography otherwise alert to so much of what transpired around Edward, one wishes that Smith had given a more distinct sense of Constance … Smith demonstrates convincingly how Garnett’s instincts proved correct in case after case, from E.M. Forster to John Galsworthy to Arnold Bennett and Edward Thomas.
Helen Smith's absorbing An Uncommon Reader: A Life of Edward Garnett captures Garnett’s extraordinary life and times. Smith’s extensive research includes fascinating excerpts of letters and recollections of Garnett’s friends … This enlightening and intimate biography looks behind the scenes to show how much time and effort went into the making and maintenance of promising , sometimes struggling, writers who became prominent authors.
... prizeworthy literary biography...Like Scribner’s Max Perkins, Garnett was, in all senses of the phrase, an editor of genius ... Edward Garnett was staunchly, even narrowly, realistic in his approach to fiction: Literature, he felt, should focus on and reveal life as it is ... In structure, An Uncommon Reader might be likened to a portrait gallery ...introduces us to Garnett’s various 'discoveries' and literary confidants ... Though An Uncommon Reader is Helen Smith’s first book, one would never know it: She delivers uncommonly good reading, and anyone interested in Edwardian fiction, the history of publishing or literary biography will find it a treat.
I heartily recommend Helen Smith's new biography An Uncommon Reader: A Life of Edward Garnett, Mentor and Editor of Literary Genius … Her biography makes clear that Garnett saw his first loyalty as to literature and its writers, not the publishers who paid him. He didn't hesitate to recommend a writer take a book to a different house … Garnett had a gift for nudging writers in more ambitious directions. Smith compliments ‘Edward's ability to 'talk' a book into being, a skill he employed to some effect throughout his career, adapting his approach to the temperament of the protege, reassuring the timid, cajoling the reluctant and bellowing at the bloody-minded.’
Here is a book that finally lifts a great man out of the letters and diaries of truly great contemporaries ... Helen Smith...has written a grand, attentive and thorough biography of a major figure who, it seems, has emerged from near-anonymity.
...a superb biography of Edward Garnett, an English critic and editor who was best known for discovering and nurturing literary talents … It’s rare that the subject of a biography is as evidently generous and full of integrity as Garnett, so Smith has to work to find the flaws whose depiction is necessary to creating a balanced portrait; despite the mentions of his infidelities, readers will end up loving Garnett. With Smith’s fine sense of pacing and a fascinating subject, her book both delights and informs.
A sensitive biography of an influential editor and critic … Smith examines Garnett’s personal as well as professional life: his devoted but unconventional marriage to Constance Garnett, an acclaimed translator of Russian literature; his siblings, friends, and lovers; the couple’s son, David, who forged a career of his own as writer and publisher. Garnett’s literary relationships could be intense … A well-informed perspective on early-20th-century literature.
