Garnett, Edward

Entry updated 25 November 2024. Tagged: Author, Theatre.

(1868-1937) publisher's reader, journalist, playwright and author, well known in the first capacity for his early advocacy of many writers who would become famous, those with entries in this encyclopedia including Joseph Conrad, E M Forster and W H Hudson; son of the librarian and author Richard Garnett, husband of the translator Constance Garnett (1862-1946), father of David Garnett [for all three Garnett authors see also The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. His greatest contemporary fame was as a campaigner against the egregious British stage censorship regime during a period when several of George Bernard Shaw's plays, and his own The Breaking Point: A Censured Play. With Preface and a Letter to the Censor (1907), were banned from the English stage.

Several of the visions assembled in An Imagined World: Poems in Prose (coll 1894) are fantasy. He served during World War One in the first British ambulance unit in Italy in 1915; his war experiences, and his disdain for the pretensions of Western civilization as a whole, shape his only work of sf interest, Papa's War & Other Satires (coll 1919), a set of Satires on politics and warfare, which reveal a freethinking, controversial, clear-headed teller of tales and allegories. [JC]

Edward William Garnett

born London: 5 January 1868

died London: 19 February 1937

works

An Imagined World: Poems in Prose (London: J M Dent and Co, 1894) [coll: prose-poems: hb/]
The Breaking Point: A Censured Play. With Preface and a Letter to the Censor (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1907) [play: hb/]
Papa's War & Other Satires (London: The Office of the Herald/George Allen and Unwin, 1918) [coll: some stories first appeared June/October 1918 English Review: hb/]

about the author

H E Bates. Edward Garnett (London: Max Parrish, 1950) [nonfiction: chap: hb/from Simon Bussy, portrait of Garnett]

links

previous versions of this entry

Internet Archive